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SPECIMENS 

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MODERN ENGLISH LITERARY 
CRITICISM 



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SPECIMENS 



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MODERN ENGLISH LITERARY 
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CHOSEN AND EDITED 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 

BY 

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PREFACE 

This book belongs to the realm of rhetoric rather than that of 
literature or literary history. It aims to use critical writing, more 
Completely than is done in any existing text-book of selections, 
a> an agent in rhetorical study and intellectual discipline. . Books 
of specimens of the so-called forms of discourse, narration, de- 
scription, exposition, and argumentation, are abundant, as well as 
useful- The present volume is less a complete illustration of a form 
of discourse than an analysis of a fair variety of pieces that would 
commonly be called literary criticism, but it is hoped that it also 
will be useful — at least to those moderately advanced students for 
whom it is intended. 

The point of view in the editing of these selections is one from 
which literary criticism is regarded, rhetorically, largely as a form 
of exposition and argumentation, and, as a matter of fact, as a body 
of more or less particular theses and opinions. Selections, there- 
fore, are given without abridgment, and the important points all 
along brought out relate to the dicta of each critic and his reasons 
for holding his opinions. The safest way to begin the study of 
literary criticism and the surest progress toward a sound knowledge 
of that art is, in my opinion, to be found in the examination of actual 
critical production. It is certainly wholesome to treat works of 
criticism like any other body of facts, as well as an illustration 
of some theory or other of the universe. Supplying material for 
analysis and some direction for study is, therefore, as far as this 
book attempts to go. 

In arrangement, the essays proceed from the simplest, most 
matter of fact, and most easily demonstrable, to the more general, 
more abstract, and less easily provable. The arrangement is as 
follows : the first eight essays deal with particular men ; num- 
bers q and 10 have to do with special topics; and the last 
five are illustrative of general discussions — from highly dif- 
ferent points of view — of literary art and morality. For 
any of the essays here an infinite variety of substitution and sup- 
plementation may, of course, be made, according to the preference 
of the teacher. I have chiefly tried to get as large a variety as 
possible within the limits of literary criticism, to avoid repetition 
of type, to present well-contrasted views and methods, and to 
avoid essays of too difficult a character. These reasons will 



VI PREFACE 

account for the omission of most earlier modern critics except 
Dryden and Johnson, and that of such later modern critics as 
Hazlitt, De Quincey, Carlyle, and Lowell. The introduction is a 
definition of criticism, and it contains also suggestions for the 
study of the form as a matter both of intelligent reading and of 
training in composition. The notes and questions are analytical 
rather than explanatory of the text; bracketed footnotes in the 
shape of translations of phrases not clear from the context are 
the only additions that I have made to the body of the book. 
I have also added a list of the books that I have cited in the course 
of the introduction and the notes, and an index of names and of 
topics. Any one who wishes to pursue the subject of criticism 
more exhaustively is, of course, referred to Professor ■ Gayley 
and Professor Scott's invaluable bibliographies in their Introduc- 
tion to the Materials and Methods of Literary Criticism. 
j If the view held in the following introduction be correct, that 
literary criticism is a corpus of opinion about literature deriving 
its ultimate sanction from personality and the general and lasting 
acceptation of its dicta — it would follow that any collection of 
good critical essays would form a suitable and desirable subject 
for rhetorical study. Such valuable collections as Professor Saints- 
bury 's Loci Critici, Mr. Yaughan's English Literary Criticism, 
and Mr. Payne's American Literary Criticism, despite a trifling 
emphasis on national rather than critical issues, are well fitted for 
such analytical study as I have here indicated, and I have profited 
greatly by them. With them, however, the historical point of 
view, the desire to show criticism as something of a growth, com- 
plicates the question, and this, in my opinion, serves to darken the 
counsel that is of prime importance for students at the outset of the 
study of literary criticism. Soundly and surely to trace the real 
history of any body of literary opinion is a delicate and complicated 
task, too hard, unquestionably, for most college students. What is 
of fundamental importance, I repeat, is for the student first to 
understand what the critic is saying and then to discern the sanc- 
tion for the faith that is in him. These questions", at the outset, 
are best kept clear of theories about development and generaliza- 
tions about the history of the art. The present book may be 
termed, in short, an introduction to the study and practice of literary 
criticism. W. T. B. 

Columbia University, 
July 12, 1907. 



CONTENTS 

PAGK 

Introduction ix 

Essays I 

i. Leslie Stephen ; Wood's Halfpence i 

2. DAVID Masson : De Quincey's Writings: Classification and 

Kei>iew . 16 

3. SAMUEL Johnson: 'Ike Metaphysical Poets .... 45 

4. Thomas BaBINGTON MACAULAY: Mr. Robert Montgomery's 

Poems 60 

5. Walter BagehoT: Charles Dickens 80 

6. Walter PATER: Wordsworth ill 

7. John Mackinnon Robertson: Pot 126 

8. John Duyden: Pre/ace to the Fables 181 

9. Frederic Harrison: Pushin as a Master of Prose . , . 202 
I0.4jCharles Lamb : On the Tragedies of Shakespeare . . . 220 

11. Henry James: The Art of Fiction 237 

12. Edc.ar Allan Poe: The Philosophy of Composition . . 257 

13. Matthew Arnold: The Study of Poetry .... 269 

14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: On Poetry and Poetic Power . 294 

15. Percy Bysshb Shelley: A Defence of Poetry . . . 307 
Notes and Questions on the Preceding Selections . . . 337 
List Of Books referred to in the Introduction and the Notes 356 
Index 361 



a „ rf y C< "'?ress (or Offi. 
3 " d,s "<"for sa)eoro(he 7 



INTRODUCTION 



I 

The once common and popular notion that criticism is fault- 
finding, more or less direct and pointed, more or less elaborate, 
is so far passing out of use that it may be dismissed with a word. 
A less easily disposed of matter remains. It confronts alike the 
serious student and the trustful seeker for authority. No one who 
has read treatises on art and literature or essays and reviews 
of authors and plays and books from the hand of eminent masters 
of the theory and practice of criticism, can fail to be struck with 
the fact that critics, like other doctors, frequently disagree in their 
judgments. The result is confusing. A prospective theatre- 
goer, for example, sees in reviews of the first night very divergent 
opinions about a particular play, and he may "shudder, and 
know not how to think " — or where to go. Or a modest seeker 
for finality, disdaining all forms of criticism that, like the foregoing 
example, hold a taint of commercialism, and seeking the repose 
of certitude in the words of high-minded masters of the critical 
essay and the acknowledged arbiters of literary taste, will be struck 
by the fact that whereas Arnold, 1 for example, assigns to Byron a 
place second only to Wordsworth, among the poets of the last 
century, Mr. Swinburne a regards Byron as no more than low 
second rate and wholly inferior to Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, 
Coleridge, and others. Who shall guard the guardians of litera- 
ture ? 

To make clearer the fact of this discrepancy a few pregnant re- 
marks as to the nature, the function, and the value of criticism may 
be quoted. "Criticism," says Mr. Collins, 3 "is to literature what 
legislation and government are to states. If they are in able and 

1 Essays in Criticism, Second Series. Wordsworth. 

Miscellanies. Wordsworth and Byron. 
1 Ephemera Critica p. 26. 



X INTRODUCTION 

honest bands, all goes well; if they are in weak and dishonest 
hands, all is anarchy and mischief." Arnold, in a frequently 
quoted passage, says, 1 "I am hound by ray own definition of 
criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the 
best that is known ami thought in the world." Pater's theory is 
summed up in these words,- "What is important, then, is not that 
the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty 
for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of 
being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects." Mr. 
Robertson's method is somewhat more argumentative: 3 "It is 
the getting behind spontaneous judgment, the ascertaining of 
how and why we differ in our judgments, that the critics so-called 
have left mostly unattempted." All these men, though at odds over 
method, evidently regard criticism as a high function. On the 
other hand, listen to Mr. Howells, 4 " Every literary movement 
has been violently opposed at the start, and yet never stayed in the 
least, or arrested, by criticism: every author has been condemned 
for his virtues, but in nowise changed by it." And again,"' "Criti- 
cism has condemned whatever was, from time to time, fresh and 
vital in literature; it has always fought the new good thing in 
behalf of the old good thing; it has invariably fostered the tame, 
the trite, the negative that survived." Leslie Stephen, out of sorts 
with his life-long profession, wrote to Mr. Thomas Hardy (May 
16, 1876):" "My remark about modern lectures was, of course, 
'wrote sarcastic,' as Artemus Ward says, and intended tor a passing 
dig in the ribs of some modern critics, who think that they can lay 
down laws in art like the Pope in religion, e.g., the whole Rossetti- 
Swinburne school. Hut if you mean seriously to ask me what criti- 
cal books I recommend, I can only say that I recommend none. 
I think that as a critic the less authors read of criticism, the better. 
You, e.g., have a perfectly fresh and original view, and I think 
that the less you bother yourself about critical canons, the less 
chance there is of your becoming self-conscious and cramped. 1 
should, indeed, advise the great writers — Shakespeare, Goethe, 
Scott, etc., etc., who give ideas and don't prescribe rules. Sainte- 
Beuve and Mat. Arnold (in a smaller way) are the only modern 
critics who seem to me worth reading — perhaps, too, Lowell. 
We are generally a poor lot, horribly afraid of not being in the 

1 Essays in Criticism, p. 38. 2 The Renaissance, p. xii. 

* New Essays towards a Critical Method, p. 4. * Criticism and E id ion, p. ;q. 

*Ibid., p. 46. « F. W. Maitland, Life of Leslie Stephen, p. 290. 



INTRODUCTION xi 

fashion, and disposed to give ourselves airs on very small grounds." 
Stephen's father was even more contemptuous. Writing to John 
Venn (August 25, 1838), he said: ' "Reviewing is an employment 
which I have never held in great esteem. It is generally a self- 
sufficient, insolent, superficial, and unedifying style of writing, and 
I fully persuaded myself that I should never be enlisted among 
the craft." The most scornful opinion is that of one of the 
"Rossetti -Swinburne school," William Morris:'- "To think of a 
beggar making a living by selling his opinion about other people! 
And fancy any one paying him for it !" 

In short, criticism is one thing to Arnold and quite another 
thing to Mr. Howells and Morris, and their views are perhaps no 
more opposite than those of Pater and Mr. Robertson. What to 
Arnold is noble and elevating, at least ideally, is to Mr. Howells, 
in practice at least, impotent, and to Morris an affair of commercial 
convenience. Whereas Pater holds faith in the sensitive individual 
judgment, Mr. Robertson deems such judgments merely data for 
further analysis. In the face of so great a divergence of opinion 
as to the function and the potency of criticism it is well to inquire 
what such views have in common and how criticism may be 
defined. 

II 

The most obvious answer to the foregoing query is that each of 
these writers is expressing what is for him a reality, or truth, or 
fact, with regard to the theory of criticism or, in its application, 
to a particular author or book. Furthermore, for every one of the 
opinions quoted above there is abundant historical evidence, and 
it remains true that criticism should be "disinterested," that it 
should be "in able and honest hands," that it should "endeavour 
to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the 
world," that "the critic should possess ... a certain kind of 
temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence 
of beautiful objects," that it should "get behind spontaneous 
judgment," that it is as a whole impotent in the presence of genius, 
and that many critics are merely commercial. 

All this means that criticism is, in the first instance, merely the 

1 Maitland, Life of Leslie Stephen, p. 14. 

8 J. W. Mat kail, The Life and Letters of William Morris, Vol. I, p. 134. 



Xll INTRODUCTION 

expression of opinion about authors, books, and theories of art 
generally. The opinion is usually expressed dogmatically; that 
is, it is expressed as if it were a fact, a reality. It is a reality in so 
far as it has existence in the mind of the critic who utters' it; it 
is a fact of what has been happily called the "existential" sort. 1 
In this sense, any chance saying about an author or a book is 
criticism: it states a fact, a reality, a truth present in the mind of 
the speaker. That opinion may be modified by further reading 
and by the clash of opinion with opinion, but the resulting judg- 
ment, if sincerely held, will be true, as an "existential" fact. 
^ This* primary conception of criticism as an expression of personal 
Opinion is admirably phrased by Professor Saintsbury in his His- 
tory of Criticism, when, speaking of the object of his work, he says, 
"In the following pages it is proposed to set forth . . . what Plato, 
Aristotle, Dionysius, Longinus, what Cicero and Quinctilian, 
what Dante and Dryden, what Corneille and Coleridge, with many 
a lesser man besides, have said about literature." ' These words 
supply a handy definition of literary criticism; it is talk about the 
things of literature, haply with a view to stating what seems to the 
critic to be true. This definition is, of course, very vague; it does 
not distinguish good criticism from bad criticism, except in respect 
to sincerity. One must, therefore, inquire further into the matter. 
Before taking up that task one or two general observations may 
be made by way of clearing the ground. The most evident cause 
for the discrepancies noted in the foregoing paragraphs lies in the 
diversity of the human temperament. No two men will be struck 
by precisely the same thing, by the same body of facts, in precisely 
the same way. Just as no two critics write about the same set of 
objects or authors, so no two critics would hold identical views with 
regard to a book that they happen to be treating in common. The 
principle is a very obvious one, but it is so often lost sight of that it 
seems necessary to exploit it once more; for people are prone to 
cling to the word of distinguished critics and catchpenny reviewers 
as if it contained final, universal, and unexpugnable truth. Such 
things the opinion of any critic does not and never can contain; 
indeed the moment a dictum becomes a dogma, the moment an 
opinion, though uttered with, is found really to contain, finality, 
it ceases to be interesting ; for the history of literary criticism shows 

1 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 4. 
"Vol. I, p. 5. 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

that method of human expression to have thriven on variousness 
of belief. 

Since, then, no two men's interests or ideas of value are just the 
same, it is a good practice in studying critics, to sec on what ideas 
they lav stress. It is always the proper method of procedure in 
observing people to note what things they love, hate, fear, and 
cherish. It will he seen that the opinions heretofore quoted have 
body and existence as reality of different sorts: some concern them- 
selves with what is loosely called impression, as with Pater; others, 
like those of Arnold, relate to moral value and significance: for 
Mr. Howells good criticism is, by implication, that which lends the 
helping hand to the next generation of writers; had, that which is 
practically impotent. 

Another very obvious reason for the discrepancy under discus- 
sion lies in the pleasing vagueness of some of the major terms 
vagueness is often a source of disagreement as well as of peace. 
What, for example, are "beautiful objects"? What is "the best 
that is known and thought in the world"? What, so to speak, 
are the finger-marks of the "able and honest hand"? What is 
the "spontaneous judgment" and by what subtle by-path may 
one "get behind it"? Over such questions much discussion 
naturally arises. Mr. Chesterton l would undoubtedly say that 
they are part and parcel of the common sense, and are therefore 
understood by everybody, without thinking. They are like our 
own names, which seem the most familiar and appropriate things 
in the world — until we begin repeating them and revolving them 
in our minds, when they lose all semblance of rime and reason. 
The moment one begins to ponder these terms they become vague. 
It is the task of each critic to illustrate his conception of these 
terms by his essays: but the fact remains that no two critics 
would agree in their illustrations of the general idea or in their 
special examples of beauty and the best. 

For these and other reasons too numerous to mention a deal of 
disagreement and conflict is the by-product of literary opinion. 
We are all, let us repeat, literary critics whenever we express an 
opinion about general or specific literary things. Some of us are 
ready and proud to abide by our opinion in the face of the whole 
world, nay, even more, are eager to air our differences; others are 
keen to cover ourselves with the cloak of authority and to take 

1 As in Heretics, 



Xll 

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xiv INTRODUCTION 

refuge in an ex cathedra personality. A study of the origins of 
criticism would be very interesting, but this is not the place for 
so pregnant a piece of illustration. Suffice it to say that there has 
in all probability been in criticism, as in all human affairs, a con- 
nect between liberty and authority. 1 The timid must always 
have sought refuge in the dicta of some more expressive and 
powerful personality; others, more independent, have been the 
iconoclasts and heretics of literary opinion, have claimed the right 
to say plainly what they felt. In the nature of things, a body 
of opinion about literary matters would arise, this tradition would 
be perpetuated by men who found in that a profitable way to gain 
their livelihood or who had real zeal for the cause, and in time the 
class of professional critic would emerge from chaos — of the tribe 
held in disesteem by the author of The Earthly Paradise. 

Aside from this tradition, best expressed in such a phrase as the 
history of taste, there have been many attempts, from before the 
days of Aristotle down, to rationalize the whole matter, to show 
what laws, what principles, what common human motive, underlie 
our critical ideas and are the sanction for authority. Not only 
have rules been given "for not writing and judging ill," but the 
problem of the fundamental law which shall enable us to know the 
truth has been, somewhat unsuccessfully, the object of search to 
many philosophical critics. 2 Abandoning as futile for our present 
purposes, though interesting, any effort to theorize along that line, 
let us turn to criticism as a body of specific actual fact, and illus- 
trating the matter by a pretty wide variety of specimens from 
well-known English criticism of high quality, let us see what, in 
general, criticism means, what are the sanctions of critical opinion, 
what objective reality means in criticism, and what are some of 
the categories actually employed in this pleasing science. 

Ill 

Criticism is both a matter of process and a matter of form. As 
to the first of these, if the foregoing analysis be sound, criticism 
may be said, broadly, to aim at establishing fact; it is a method 
of demonstration. Viewed in this light, criticism may be applied 

1 For an able statement of the essence and merits of this conflict, see W. P. 
Trent, The Author it v of Criticism. 

• See, for example, C. T. Winchester, Some Principles of Literary Criticism, 
and W. J. Courthorpe, Life in Poetry, Law in Taste. 



INTRODUCTION XV 

to any branch of human thought or activity; any idea or process 
may be subject to it ; one may criticise the latest findings of 
astronomy or the making of armor-plate and automobiles, may 
criticise oatmeal as a food or Ossian as an oasis in an alleged age 
of prose. The object of the process is to approximate some reality 
underlying these institutions. Truth, that is what criticism is 
seeking. Criticism, then, like truth, may be classified according • 
to the material with which it deals. Literary criticism is one of 
these classes ; it enjoys the distinction of being at once the most 
conspicuous entity among the various branches of criticism and 
the most inaccurate and indefinite in the application of its tests. 
Literary criticism stumbles at the starting line in its attempt to 
define literature, and its tests are evidently not so precise as may 
be applied in a matter of natural or chemical science. For some 
expounders of literature will have it that the ideas are the main 
thing, others, that the expression of personality is what counts, 
still others, that one must seize the " inner" meaning and the 
spiritual significance. In the main, however, literary criticism, 
like other forms of criticism, seeks (i) to establish the facts of 
literature and (2) to pass judgment on the value and significance 
of those facts. Since passing judgment on the worth or value of 
a fact or body of facts is really nothing but establishing another 
fact, though in a different category, the aim of literary criticism 
may be defined as, broadly, that which we stated at the beginning 
of this paragraph — the establishing of facts, of whatever sort, so 
they be facts — that is, truths, realities — about literature. Like 
any intellectual process, literary criticism may therefore be defined 
by (1) the material with which it deals and (2) the methods which 
it used to establish its conclusions, the cogency of which varies 
greatly with the material. 

Under the head of material, a large number of classes may be 
recognized and commonly are recognized. Textual criticism, 
for example, aims to establish the correctness of the text of an 
author; it employs, very usefully, much human energy. Bio- 
graphical criticism tries to establish the facts of the life of an 
author and to show how they are related to his writing; Stephen's 
account of Swift's work in behalf of Ireland in this volume is an 
illustration of this sort of essay, and it shows the relation of criti- 
cism to biography. Akin to this are facts of personality, of 
temperament and the like. Facts of vogue are a source of material 
not to be neglected ; indeed, these facts, like those of the life of the 



XVI INTRODUCTION 

author, may almost be said to be the starting point for any good 
criticism whatsoever. Facts of vogue, of contemporary opinion, 
of what people have said, are, of course, the basis of all good 
historical criticism. In passing, however, it may be said that 
what has been called the " collective" estimate of books and 
authors receives, on the whole, too little attention from critics. 
Critics usually prefer theorizing and airing their own views to 
looking up the facts. It is one of Coleridge's claims to distinc- 
tion as a critic that he makes the vogue of Wordsworth the starting 
point for his account, though he quickly becomes transcendental. 
Mr. Robertson's critique of Poe is largely an analysis of the col- 
lective estimate of Poe, with comments of his own. It is one of 
the best specimers of that type that we have. An even more 
matter of fact example is in Mr. Sidney Lee's Life of William 
Shakespeare, a chapter (20) entitled Shakespeare's Posthumous 
Reputation. Questions of influence, when treated as matters of 
fact, and other such topics come under this head. But one who 
looks into the matter will be amazed to see how little critical 
writing, comparatively, there is of this sort. Careful literary histo- 
rians are usually much more concerned with their own views 
and those of their fellow-critics than with strictly contemporary 
opinion. Even modern critics, dealing with modern authors, go 
into the rationale, the aesthetics, the personality, or what not, to 
the exclusion of this important source of material. 1 This is a 
field in which an enormous amount of literary work remains to 
be done. 

Facts relating to the class or type of writer to which an author 
belongs are another well-recognized kind of material. Johnson's 
exposition of the metaphysical poets is an example of this interest. 
Many of the great classes or types have become more or less set, 
and we have the commonly accepted categories of epic, dramatic, 

1 See, for example, Mr. A. C. Benson's Life of Pater in the English Men of 
Letters series. Mr. Benson devotes much time to summarizing Pater's works 
(a totally unnecessary thing for one who has read them and not very inspiriting 
for one who has not) and much time to comment on Pater's style, personality, etc. 
Perhaps Mr. Benson did not mean to give us more, and his attitude is surely 
worshipful and decorous, but one would welcome a word about Pater's actual 
influence. In contrast are to be named Professor Lounsbury's studies in the vogue 
of Shakespeare (Shakesperian Wars). A conscientious endeavour to state a 
method which shall account for all possible sources and hence be a "collective" 
criticism is to be found in E. Hennequin's La Critique Scientifique. This is sum- 
marized by Mr. Robertson in New Essays towards a Critical Method (The Theory 
and Practice of Criticism). 



INTRODUCTION xvil 

elegiac, lyric poetry, etc., and, in prose, such things as the essay 
and the novel. It is the aim of much modern criticism to study 
these types, and criticism characteristically goes beyond mere study 
of the form and tries to ascertain the further fact of the comparative 
value of each class, with a view to confining judicial comment to 
intra-, rather than inter-, class comparisons. Why attempt to 
compare a lyric and a novel ? They are in different media and are 
not susceptible of real comparison except as representatives of 
alleged higher and lower classes. Facts of treatment, of method, 
of art, of form, occupy a very conspicuous place in the history of 
criticism Modern rhetorical study, for example, is merely a prac- 
tical application of some of the critical results obtained in the 
study of this medium. Of the essays in this volume those of Poe, 
Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Robertson will be found, to contain material 
of this sort. 

An exceedingly prolific source of actual critical commentary lies 
in the interpretation of an author's meaning. The love of literary 
interpretation seems to be deep seated in the human heart; the 
hidden meaning, the underlying mystery, is always a charming 
thing to conjure with, and it offers possibilities of interest and fur- 
ther mystification that no accurate scientific study can ever hope to 
equal. " Whole rivulets of ink," as Swift would say, have been 
expended in the yet unsettled question of what Shakespeare meant 
Hamlet to mean ; and an equally prolific study could be made of 
the different interpretations that have been put on Dante's Divina 
Commedia. Lowell's essay on Dante, 1 for example, is mainly one 
of interpretation, designed to convey to the then somewhat untu- 
tored American audience a proper conception of Dante's meaning 
and to correct some of the mistakes of interpretation of a preceding 
volume by Maria Francesca Rossetti. 2 A good example of not too 
solemn interpretation is Mr. Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wag- 
nerite, and it is a good subject for study in that the author gives 
evidence of an apparently definite sort for his interpretations. 
In general, the literary interpreter, like the critic who neglects the 
collective view, does not much trouble himself with a historical 
aspect of the subject, but reads his own meanings into it. Brown- 
ing, perhaps, more than any modern Englishman has been the 
prey of interpreters, scientific, philosophical, theosophical, neo- 
platonic, symbolistic. The truth of the matter is that interpreta- 

1 Prose Works, Vol. IV. 2 A Shadow of Dante. 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

tion is much more a matter of creation than of argumentative 
science, and hence it is one of the most winning forms that the 
critical process can follow. 

Akin to interpretation is much of the criticism that seeks its 
material in moral values and in significance. It is, of course, 
about this attitude that the fierce discussions of art for art's sake 
have arisen. To some critics a writer like Poe is insignificant and 
meretricious because he did not in the least care to inculcate a moral 
and "significant" view of the universe, but preferred to work as 
skilfully from any premises that he chose to assume to a perfect 
conclusion from those premises. The comparative admiration that 
the French have for Poe, the scorn which those of us who are more 
used to Emerson and Hawthorne feel for him, is both an illustra- 
tion and a proof of the fact that such differences of opinion are tem- 
peramental and racial rather than demonstrable and rational. 
Arnold, of the writers in this volume, most sternly held to the moral 
view of literature ; Poe to the artistic. Shelley, of course, is a critic 
who attempts to ground the morality of his position in the innate 
yearning of humanity for the ideal. 

There are other sources of material, but the matter need be no 
further illustrated. Besides the material and the point of view 
from which it is approached, there are naturally a great many 
questions connected with the personality, the predilection, and the 
training of the critic. These all modify the result, so that, as a 
matter of fact, of the categories of material named above, not one 
can be found, actually, to exist in a pure state. A critic pre- 
sumably writes what he feels, what he deems it good for people to 
know, and does not think of the categories. The combination of 
the elements just spoken of — the material, the personality, the 
point of view, the animus, the training, etc., of the critic — result, 
for purposes of convenience, in several classes or types of criticism. 
They should be called tendencies rather than types, since the 
line of separation between any two classes cannot be surely drawn. 
Though the classifications are not very satisfactory, some of the 
main types may be briefly indicated. 

The primary, the most elementary, and by all means the safest, 
is impressionism. It is elementary because it is concerned merely 
with what the critic happens to think at the moment, and because 
the critic's reaction, though often expressed with much charm, 
is never other than a variably personal one. It is safe, for a critic 
may always take refuge in the phrase which there is no gainsaying, 



INTRODUCTION xix 

"So it seems to me," and may, if he be impolite and a Capulet, 
bite his thumb at other critics. It is not wholly a matter of regret 
that from the writings of an impressionistic critic it usually is 
impossible to make out a consistent theory of the universe or of 
criticism. A case in point is the brilliant contemporary English 
critic, Mr. Chesterton, who seems occasionally to contradict his 
premises in his conclusions or in succeeding premises. To differ, 
eternally to differ, from previous opinion, to have intuitions and to 
express them with a vigorous air of finality, is the one principle 
that lends coherence and form to his stimulating and often admir- 
able suggestions. Probably M. Jules Lemaitre, the distinguished 
French critic, is the classic exponent of this type of criticism. In 
this volume Lamb is perhaps the best example. 

The type has many opposites. The one nearest to it is probably 
the so-called "interpretative" or " appreciative " frame of mind. 
As these names imply, criticism of this sort strives to throw light 
on the real meaning or character of the author or to weigh and 
measure him at his just value. Like any criticism, it may deal with 
different kinds of material — personality, work, style, etc. — but 
its essence is an attempt justly to appreciate the subject, to weigh it 
at its proper worth. It is the opposite of the impressionistic type 
in that it aims to take into consideration the author and his work 
from his point of view and not merely from that of the personal 
reaction of the critic. Pater is perhaps the most systematic ex- 
ponent of the appreciative tendency in English literature, but such 
critics as Bagehot, Arnold, and Coleridge often deal with appre- 
ciative categories. 

An opposite of both of these is the so-called judicial type, now 
happily, in its extreme forms, tending to pass out of existence. 
Characteristically it consists in setting up or strongly implying a 
standard — philosophical, political, religious, commercial, socio- 
logical, or what not — and rating literature by it. Alleged "canons 
of criticism" derived from the practice of "Tully, Lord Karnes, 
and other elegant writers," are examples of a fashion that has been 
persistent since the days of Aristotle. All criticism, in some way, 
implies a standard, but in criticism of the judicial type, the stand- 
ard is found, not in the critic's likes and dislikes, as with im- 
pressionism, nor in the author's own purpose, as in appreciation, 
but in something external to both. The best example of judicial 
criticism that we have, alike of its manner and of its final im- 
potence, is to be found in the work of Francis Jeffrey, whose stand- 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

tion is much more a matter of creation than of argumentative 
science, and hence it is one of the most winning forms that the 
critical process can follow. 

Akin to interpretation is much of the criticism that seeks its 
material in moral values and in significance. It is, of course, 
about this attitude that the fierce discussions of art for art's sake 
have arisen. To some critics a writer like Poe is insignificant and 
meretricious because he did not in the least care to inculcate a moral 
and "significant" view of the universe, but preferred to work as 
skilfully from any premises that he chose to assume to a perfect 
conclusion from those premises. The comparative admiration that 
the French have for Poe, the scorn which those of us who are more 
used to Emerson and Hawthorne feel for him, is both an illustra- 
tion and a proof of the fact that such differences of opinion are tem- 
peramental and racial rather than demonstrable and rational. 
Arnold, of the writers in this volume, most sternly held to the moral 
view of literature ; Poe to the artistic. Shelley, of course, is a critic 
who attempts to ground the morality of his position in the innate 
yearning of humanity for the ideal. 

There are other sources of material, but the matter need be no 
further illustrated. Besides the material and the point of view 
from which it is approached, there are naturally a great many 
questions connected with the personality, the predilection, and the 
training of the critic. These all modify the result, so that, as a 
matter of fact, of the categories of material named above, not one 
can be found, actually, to exist in a pure state. A critic pre- 
sumably writes what he feels, what he deems it good for people to 
know, and does not think of the categories. The combination of 
the elements just spoken of — the material, the personality, the 
point of view, the animus, the training, etc., of the critic — result, 
for purposes of convenience, in several classes or types of criticism. 
They should be called tendencies rather than types, since the 
line of separation between any two classes cannot be surely drawn. 
Though the classifications are not very satisfactory, some of the 
main types may be briefly indicated. 

The primary, the most elementary, and by all means the safest, 
is impressionism. It is elementary because it is concerned merely 
with what the critic happens to think at the moment, and because 
the critic's reaction, though often expressed with much charm, 
is never other than a variably personal one. It is safe, for a critic 
may always take refuge in the phrase which there is no gainsaying, 



INTRODUCTION xix 

"So it seems to me/' and may, if he be impolite and a Capulet, 
bite his thumb at other critics. It is not wholly a matter of regret 
that from the writings of an impressionistic critic it usually is 
impossible to make out a consistent theory of the universe or of 
criticism. A case in point is the brilliant contemporary English 
critic, Mr. Chesterton, who seems occasionally to contradict his 
premises in his conclusions or in succeeding premises. To differ, 
eternally to differ, from previous opinion, to have intuitions and to 
express them with a vigorous air of finality, is the one principle 
that lends coherence and form to his stimulating and often admir- 
able suggestions. Probably M. Jules Lemaitre, the distinguished 
French critic, is the classic exponent of this type of criticism. In 
this volume Lamb is perhaps the best example. 

The type has many opposites. The one nearest to it is probably 
the so-called "interpretative" or "appreciative" frame of mind. 
As these names imply, criticism of this sort strives to throw light 
on the real meaning or character of the author or to weigh and 
measure him at his just value. Like any criticism, it may deal with 
different kinds of material — personality, work, style, etc. — but 
its essence is an attempt justly to appreciate the subject, to weigh it 
at its proper worth. It is the opposite of the impressionistic type 
in that it aims to take into consideration the author and his work 
from his point of view and not merely from that of the personal 
reaction of the critic. Pater is perhaps the most systematic ex- 
ponent of the appreciative tendency in English literature, but such 
critics as Bagehot, Arnold, and Coleridge often deal with appre- 
ciative categories. 

An opposite of both of these is the so-called judicial type, now 
happily, in its extreme forms, tending to pass out of existence. 
Characteristically it consists in setting up or strongly implying a 
standard — philosophical, political, religious, commercial, socio- 
logical, or what not — and rating literature by it. Alleged "canons 
of criticism" derived from the practice of "Tully, Lord Karnes, 
and other elegant writers," are examples of a fashion that has been 
persistent since the days of Aristotle. All criticism, in some way, 
implies a standard, but in criticism of the judicial type, the stand- 
ard is found, not in the critic's likes and dislikes, as with im- 
pressionism, nor in the author's own purpose, as in appreciation, 
but in something external to both. The best example of judicial 
criticism that we have, alike of its manner and of its final im- 
potence, is to be found in the work of Francis Jeffrey, whose stand- 



XX INTRODUCTION 

ards, derived from the canons of the eighteenth century and the 
Whiggism of the time, proved inadequate to cope with the outburst 
of imaginative literature at the opening of the nineteenth century. 1 
It is critics of this type whom Mr. Howells has in mind, and their 
name is legion. Every critic in this volume is to some degree an 
example of it. Most conspicuous is Arnold, whose standard is 
a literary-moral one. The aesthetic critic who, like Hazlitt or Mr. 
Harrison, showers adjectives of characterization upon us, may be- 
long to this class. Or he may be an impressionist or an appre 
ciator. 

There is also a type known as the scientific, the opposite of 
all those that have preceded, but most strikingly opposed to im- 
pressionism. This operates by collecting, comparing, and weigh- 
ing of all possible data, with a view to arriving at a stricter and 
less personal and prejudiced view of the subject than the other 
methods furnish. The tests are argumentative, but there can never 
be hope of reaching so accurate results as are obtained in more 
strictly scientific work. Good inductive criticism of literature is 
scarce. The data are too complicated, the personal equation too 
much in the way, to make possible any fixed result. Mr. Robert- 
son's valuable work is a good instance of this type, and the essay 
on Poe is, in his own opinion, the best example of his method. 
To a certain degree, of course, writers like Bagehot are "scientific" 
in that they expound facts which in a large measure are not open 
to question. 

A distinction frequently drawn is that between destructive and 
constructive criticism. Destructive criticism is, as its name im- 
plies, that which aims to overthrow what has been regarded as 
established and accepted, a theory, a set of ideas, a fair reputation, 
without any palpable substitution. Macaulay's essay on Mont- 
gomery does this and does it very effectively, much more so than 
the destructive criticism of Jeffrey, whose work, as a matter of 
historical fact, in the long run failed of its purpose. What gives 
destructive criticism its effect is an interesting problem for study; 
it will probably be found to reside, like most of the sanctions for 
critical opinion, in the consensus of opinion — of which more later 
on. Destructive criticism will be found usually on the side of 
conservatism, and, like satire, it gains its force from being sub- 
stantially in accord with some sort of prevailing sentiment. Much 

1 See L. E. Gates, Selections from the Essays of Francis Jeffrey, Introduction. 



INTRODUCTION XXI 

destructive criticism is, of course, of an iconoclastic kind; a 
good example of vigorous attacks on reputations of great currency 
will be found in Mr. Robertson's Modern Humanists. As to con- 
structive criticism, it aims to establish new ideas and principles , 
to ascertain what may underlie the obvious and the ordinary 
that is really of more importance, and it aims to infer the unknown 
from the known. To its inductions and generalizations we owe 
whatever literary principles we have. 

As has been said these types are merely tendencies, and others 
may be recognized. Viewed with regard to any group of con- 
temporary authors they do not seem, unless the critics are openly 
hostile to each other, to amount to much. It is when one over- 
looks the whole field of criticism that they assume larger propor- 
tions and stand for different fashions and different vogues. 



IV 

As a matter of form, criticism may be defined as a body of more 
or less substantial and complete theses. If actual critical books 
and essays are looked at, criticism will appear to be no more than 
a great many separate essays and books each of which presents a 
pretty complete or a pretty scattering set of ideas, of which the 
latter type is the more moribund. The truth of this characteriza- 
tion will be borne out by an cursory glance at the contents of this 
volume. Here are fifteen essays, varying in length from five thou- 
sand to twenty-five thousand words. Nearly every one is a well- 
known example of literary criticism, but practically all that can be 
said, truthfully, of them in common is that each presents the sincere 
views of the author, that each presents a pretty complete thesis, or 
central idea, and that each has been more or less widely read and 
accepted. Yet each, as the footnotes witness, is capable of exten- 
sion and elaboration. Were they articles, treatises, and books 
instead of being essays, or were they short reviews and notes they 
would still be amenable to this description, to wit, — that a critical 
article, essay, or book, is a piece of writing that aims to present a 
body of fact or theory about some author or book, — about litera- 
ture, in short, — to a reader or an audience. Criticism, then, may 
be judged on purely rhetorical grounds. Aside from the value or 
the currency of its ideas, it is good criticism in so far as it presents 
a clear thesis or a coherent body of facts. Like any other piece 



xxil INTRODUCTION 

of writing it is amenable to sound rhetorical principles. Its clear- 
ness is of prime importance. 

Any occasion may serve for the display of criticism and any 
motive may serve for its expression. Desire to explain the vogue 
of an author ; a zeal, as in Ruskin's Modern Painters, to see justice 
done ; a personal interest and a wish to share a pleasure ; a desire, 
as with Arnold, to keep people from dying in their literary sins ; 
the need of money — all these are adequate motives for the pro- 
duction of critical work. Hence criticism may also take any form 
it pleases. Here, again, we recognize conventional types. The 
most frequent and most perishable is the book notice, a little shorter 
lived than the formal book-review ; there is the introductory essay, 
preface, or prologue ; there is the independent essay, the lecture 
or address, the critical biography, the literary history. These are 
matters of more or less formal occasion. They are not essentially 
different from any forms of discourse or public address, and good- 
ness and badness, from this point of view, has been abundantly 
treated in books on formal rhetoric or the art of discourse. 1 

From the rhetorical point of view, criticism is sometimes spoken 
of as if it were a separate form or method of discourse, distinct, 
that is, from description, narration, exposition, and argumenta- 
tion. Specific critical essays, however, are, like almost any actual 
writing, combinations of these forms. Criticism certainly employs 
description and narration, chiefly by way of illustration, and it is, 
as has been shown in the present section, in form, a matter of 
good exposition ; in substance it is often largely argumentative. 



The relation of criticism to argumentation naturally leads to the 
important question of the proof of which critical opinion is sus- 
ceptible. Clearly this is a very vital question, and no one should 
shirk it ; for the reason that people are prone to accept the word of 
critics as final, as fact, whereas the word of critics is, in the first 
instance, fact only in the sense that it exists in the mind of the 
critics. What, so to speak, is the objective proof for such opin- 
ions, what is the demonstration, what the sanctions for any 
critical opinion whatsoever? How can critical opinion about 
books be verified, be accepted as of wider than merely personal 
intuition and truth? 

1 As, for example, R. C. Ringwalt's Modem American Oratory, 



INTRODUCTION XXlll 

These questions are capable of no one answer. It would be 
a far easier matter for Leslie Stephen to prove the truth of his 
conclusions about Swift's work for Ireland, than for Matthew 
Arnold to demonstrate the ultimate value of his touchstones, or 
for Shelley to substantiate the conception underlying his famous 
essay. Church records, histories of Ireland, some well-deduced 
conclusions from well-known facts would furnish Stephen with the 
proof that he needed. No such facts exist for the establishment 
of the presumption that a few selected lines of poetry may serve as 
a gauge for all literary production whatsoever, and most people, 
even if they grant the truth of Arnold's thesis, are put to it when 
they try to make a practical application thereof; one can find the 
"great note" in many things, if one has an ear for great notes or 
is willing to put up with a little self-deception. The proof for 
Shelley's position is as general as that which divides into opposing 
camps the philosophers of the origin of ideas and the reasons why 
there is such a thing as conscience. The demonstration of much 
of an essay like Bagehot's is a series of axiomatic (and brilliantly 
phrased) divisions ; if you have a large number of the hoops and 
have arranged them well, and can shoot tolerably straight through 
them, you are sure, if you can draw Bagehot's bow of Odysseus, 
to make some palpable hit. Johnson arrives at his conclusions 
about the metaphysical poets largely by process of illustration. In 
a sense one may prove anything by illustration; it is very easy 
to find some sort of illustration for any thesis that one may wish ; 
Shakespeare has been written down an ass by analysis and illus- 
tration; and the charge brought against the fairness and the 
finality of Johnson is that he failed to give examples of the really 
admirable side of the poets whom he happens almost immortally 
to have characterized. 

Speaking, in general, there are two chief classes of proof for 
critical opinion in literary matters. These classes may be shown 
by an analysis of actual critical essays and books. The first and 
by far the most common sanction for critical opinion lies in per- 
sonality, broadly regarded. The ability to express one's opinion 
tends to create believers in that opinion, and, though opposition 
may also be aroused, it is in this way that cults are formed and 
opinion becomes crystallized. Such opinions will be more or less 
widely held in proportion as they are useful and valuable to the 
people whom they chance to affect; what seems to be good will 
hold, what is not useful will perish or be regarded as a curious and 



XXIV INTRODUCTION 

casual expression of by-gone taste. Agreement of opinion on a 
small scale constitutes a cult or school; on a large scale, held rather 
subconsciously, agreement goes to make taste, the most potent, 
though not a fixed, arbiter in matters literary. Personal opinion, 
then, expanded and diffused till it becomes an affair of wide-spread 
conviction, of pleasing certitude, finally of common-sense, is really 
the main sanction and source of support for all critical opinion 
whatsoever. 

That this is so may be shown by two examples, which, though 
open to the charge of being illustrations, are nevertheless reason- 
ably true. That Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and others 
are "classics" can be demonstrated only by this method of uni- 
versal consent, by this broad argument from personality. We do 
not necessarily read these classics, but we hold them dear, because 
there are in them elements of permanent value (as it seems) for 
mankind. It would, perhaps, be more strictly truthful to say that 
the word "classic" is a term of endearment that we have agreed 
to apply to books of a certain type, fulfilling certain requirements 
that we have agreed to like. However that may be, the point 
is that the place of such books exists in, receives its sanction through, 
is demonstrable by, popular favour, through a large number of 
years, over a wide extent of country. Like the American Con- 
stitution or the Declaration of Independence, a literary opinion is 
a human institution, and will be held so long as it is useful and no 
longer. The demonstration of its truth lies in its utility, just as 
tastes change and literary taste is modified, when they cease to 
be agreeable, pleasing, and satisfying. 

Lest this should seem too pragmatic a view of criticism to hold, 
the other illustration may be cited. Just as a plain matter of fact, 
most criticism, as actually written, never trespasses on funda- 
mental ground. Nine-tenths of the actual criticism is in perfect 
accord with the popular and traditional taste, with popular and 
traditional morality and ethics. Certain critics, to be sure, thrive 
and batten on dissent and paradox: but for the most part it is the 
role of the critic to receive as correct the current "collective" 
opinion — which he is doing something to help form and crystallize. 
His task is then to find reasons for its correctness. These reasons 
naturally differ according to the temperament and taste of the 
critic, as in the variety of reasons found by the distinguished Eng- 
lish critics of the first quarter of the nineteenth century for the 
assumption that Shakespeare is of unparalleled genius. Indeed, 



INTRODUCTION XXV 

the critics who make us see things in a different light are com- 
paratively few and far between. Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, 
Arnold, Pater, to name a few mentioned in this volume, have given 
new facts and have more or less widely inculcated new ways of 
looking at things. 

The other method of demonstration is of a more scientific sort. 
What scientific checks, what argumentative methods of the con- 
vincing, rather than the persuasive, sort can be applied to critical 
opinion? Clearly the facts of any established branch of know- 
ledge might be applied to opinions. Thus, modern philology 
undoubtedly teaches us that Dryden's view of Chaucer's verse is 
wrong, and a flitting acquaintance with the life of Shakespeare, 
the history of the stage, or the most common motive for human 
endeavour, would dispose of the Lamb's paradox that Shake- 
speare's plays are unfit for stage representation. The facts of 
philology, of literary history, and even the course of traditional 
authority are checks to opinion. This matter, of course, requires 
a very full exposition for satisfactory treatment. 

Tests such as are to be used in a legal proceeding may be em- 
ployed with some result. A critic, who is capable of contradicting 
himself, is, despite Emerson's famous dictum, not to be taken as a 
guide to ultimate truth. It is, naturally, reasonable to avoid any 
such guide to the kingdom of right in literary matters. A prevail- 
ing love of paradox, a scorn of common opinion, a contempt for 
authority, are often entertaining in a critic — where they do not 
do much real harm — but they do not contribute to one's certitude 
and peace of mind, if one is in quest of verity. Inaccuracy with 
regard to facts may, under some circumstances, tends to make a 
reader hesitate about accepting an opinion as really very authori- 
tative, and yet some of our most charming literary critics are not 
always exact. Vagueness as to the main thesis may possibly 
cause one to doubt the minor dicta. It is, for example, a substan- 
tial charge to be made against much of Arnold's social criticism, 
and to some degree against his literary criticism, that after caution- 
ing us against our besetting sins, he tells that we must have 
something "real." Now, "the real thing" is something that the 
shortcomings are not, but we never get any nearer to it than that ; 
positively, it remains undefined, and causes beginners in Arnold to 
scratch their heads and chew their pencils, forgetting that Arnold 
is a very valuable critic by reason of bringing in new material and 
new points of view to the attention of his fellow-islanders. "Per- 



XXVI . INTRODUCTION 

sonal characteristics that are likely to interfere with the success " 
— as an intelligence office or a teacher's agency would say — of 
the critic, as rancour, malice, a desire for revenge, a prevailing 
flippancy, a slovenly style of address, are in the way of the per- 
manent acceptability of critical opinion. The basis of Mr. Rob- 
ertson's well-taken attack on Griswold's criticism of Poe is that 
Griswold stultified himself by harbouring motives of revenge 
against his dead author. Such a view is coming to be the common 
verdict with regard to all the Griswoldian criticism. The common 
view, the commonly accepted opinion — that is the ultimate court 
of appeal in criticism — that is, like usage in language, what gives 
even the critic his final place. Argumentative and other tests are 
but methods of hastening or retarding the process. All induction, 
so called, in literary criticism must ultimately be based on data 
supplied by diverse and fallible minds. 

In sum, if the preceding analyses are correct, literary criticism 
is opinion about books, authors, and literary art, with a view, so 
far as possible, to establishing acceptable fact. Actually, it consists 
of a corpus of opinion, theory, and fact, in the form of reviews, 
essays, addresses, treatises, casual sayings, and dicta generally. 
It may deal with personality, with ideas, with style, — in short, with 
any aspect of literature that it please, and still be criticism. It will 
be good criticism in so far as it utters ideas that it is good for 
mankind to know, or that contain in themselves substantial demon- 
stration of their truth. It will also be good in proportion as it is 
orderly, clear, and definite in exposition. It would follow that 
the essentials of good criticism are, as personal qualities, sincerity, 
fairness, and candour ; as intellectual characteristics, knowledge of 
the facts, and an ability to use the ordinary rules of logic and 
common sense ; as expression, clear and orderly statement. 

VI 

Let us pursue the matter into the region of practice. Criticism 
is a very interesting field for both amusing and disciplinary 
study, and the writing of critiques is pleasing diversion as well 
as an occasionally irksome part of the rhetorical curriculum in 
colleges. 

The analysis of criticism and critical essays may be briefly ex- 
plained. The most important element is surely the material that 
the critic has to expound and the ideas that he sets forth; his 



INTRODUCTION XXVH 

substance, in short, is, as in any prose work, the first thing to be 
taken into consideration by the student. The point of view of the 
writer, that is to say, the kind of proof that he uses in support 
of his conclusions, is another important element. In short, 
the essential process is (i) to note the critic's conclusions, and 
(2) then see the steps by which he reached them. After these may 
properly come (3) a study of the occasion as effecting the treatment, 
and (4) an analysis of the structure and style. The actual fact, 
the soundness of the opinion, the quality and kind of proof, the 
standards explicit and implicit — these are the important things. 
For convenience in this analysis, a student should have in mind 
the extreme types of criticism : impressionism, where an author 
gives simply and solely his own feeling or opinion without regard 
to external and objective fact, and a matter-of-fact statement of the 
collective fact. No writer in this volume quite reaches either 
extreme. Lamb is nearest to impressionism; Mr. Robertson to 
collectivism. 

The selections in this book will furnish abundant material for 
analysis. They represent considerable variety of taste and opinion 
and they are arranged in order from the simplest and most easily 
demonstrable positions, dealing with particular men, up to the 
more general and abstract positions, dealing with general theories 
and points of view. Any body of criticism which the student may 
pick up will, however, serve as well for the purposes of analytical 
and disciplinary study. Lowell, Hazlitt, DeQuincey, Carlyle, Rus- 
kin, Mill, Thackeray, Addison, Ben Jonson, Sidney, George 
Eliot, Hunt, Jeffrey, F. W. H. Myers, R. W. Church, Mark Patti- 
son, G. H. Lewes, and among living critics, Mr. Collins, Mr. 
Stedman, Mr. Morley, Mr. Courthorpe, Mr. Chesterton, Mr. 
Archer, Mr. Birrell, Mr. Colvin, Professor Gosse, Professor 
Saintsbury, Professor Ward, Professor Woodberry, and many 
others are among the best-known and substantial critics. It 
must not be forgotten that criticism, to revert to Professor Saints- 
bury's dictum, is what these men and many others have said about 
books, and that they have their accepted position because they say 
things that we gladly hear, though often with reservation and 
disagreement. Nor must it be forgotten that the aim in reading 
any critic is not only to find out his opinions but to ascertain 
how he arrived at them. It is an admirable study, so long as 
the student does not make many demands on the Real and 
the Absolute. 



XXV111 INTRODUCTION 



VII 



To turn to the writing of criticism. In the preface to one of the 
most handy, compact, complete, and sensible of the many modern 
text-books on rhetoric, the author * says, "In attempts at literary 
criticism or anything resembling it the average student produces 
rubbish." And the author adds, with a competence that no one 
can question, that very few men in any large newspaper office 
have adequate intellectual equipment for producing respectable 
criticism. Those of us who have had much experience with the 
literary production of students will readily admit the truth of the 
remark; students' criticisms are far too often jejune, attenuated, 
vague. Young writers are prone to glut their themes with such 
phrases, to cite actual examples, as "real life," "rare imaginative 
power and beauty," "a personality of singular charm," "a certain 
unique style" (of the late General Lew Wallace), "natural," "spon- 
taneous," "deep thought," "appreciation of nature," "striking at 
the root of things," "underlying thought," "the book itself," "in 
harmony with its theme," "singular suggestiveness and beauty," 
"characteristic tone," "distinctly reflective trend" (of, say, J. S. 
Mill), a "certain something" (there or wanting, as the case may 
be). Wordsworth's ballads, we are told, "lack charm, power, 
grace, sympathy, fine sentiment, effectiveness." Sir Thomas 
Browne's style "is a complete expression of the author's person- 
ality." Or, again, "his style is not sustained." Or, referring 
to the same eminent mystic, "The man himself chiefly interests 
us — a man of distinctly intellectual quality, and of great rich- 
ness of imagination and intensity of feeling." George Eliot 
"understands human nature, "but "many of her characters are 
not universal." "If she does not give us all the truth about life, 
she touches some of its deeper realities — She loves the deeper 
problems." "She has a perfectly marvellous insight into human 
nature. Few, if any, of her characters are overdrawn." Keats 
"left a poetic heritage rich in classical themes, cloaked in imagery 
both tropical and delicate, sensuous, breathing an intense love 
of beauty as beauty." His "Eve of St. Agnes holds one under 
a spell in its romantic loveliness, almost as strong as the weird 
charm of the Ancient Mariner. Such suggestiveness, such exquisite 

1 H. Lamont, English Composition. 



INTRODUCTION xxix 

colouring, such delicate characterization, of youthful Madeline 
and Porphyro contrasted with the ancient dame and beadsman." 
"To a Grecian Urn is a unique treatment of an unusual idea. 
With a classic breath he vitalizes the pictorial decorations of the 
urn, and warms them with the atmosphere of ancient Greece." 

Such phrases and dicta, the list of which might be indefinitely 
prolonged, have repeatedly come under the eye of the reader of 
themes. To condemn them and, by inference, all student criti- 
cism is an easy task, and it is still easier, as probably every teacher 
has been inclined to do, to laugh at them. But one must plead for 
a distinction, as Arnold would say. Courses in criticism, the writ- 
ing of criticism, have assumed a pretty definite place, just as a 
matter of fact, in many colleges ; they are found to be a profitable 
source of discipline, and students are interested in the subject. 
The dicta quoted, to be sure, are not interesting; for the most 
part they stand for genuine impressions that young readers have; 
but they are either very vague and so obvious that one could guess 
at them with his eyes shut, or they are very exclamatory, and in 
either case half a dozen pages of such talk is not good. They 
are nearly as low as the "red blood" or the "vital, absorbing 
interest" of the stories that "grip" you, like the influenza, in a 
newspaper review or its twin brother, the publisher's advertise- 
ment of the latest novel. The remedy is largely a rhetorical one, 
and is more easily stated than applied ; for the application of any 
precept usually calls for much fasting and prayer. Stated, it is 
simply that students should be required to say fewer things and 
to say each more definitely. 

General faults of most frequent occurrence will be found to lie 
in the region of the intellectual conscience and in the manner of 
expression. As to the first of these, students are prone to say too 
many things and to say more than they really know. They deal, 
perhaps, too largely with personal "appeal," yet, if their expo- 
sition of their own impressions was clear and forcible, much could be 
said for such limitation. But the danger is that they will look at 
an author in terms of a naturally narrow experience, instead of tak 
ing him in his own terms, merely, so to speak, as a matter of fact. 
A student will sometimes assert, with undoubted truth, surely, that 
he doesn't see how Thoreau, say, could have lived alone in the 
woods and cooked his own meals as he did, because, forsooth, 
modern city houses, with good plumbing and a bevy of cooks, are 
good enough for the critic. Doubtless this attitude is more 



XXX INTRODUCTION 

wholesome than the sentimental one would be, but it does not con- 
duce to an understanding of Thoreau. Nor is it possible to agree 
with the earnest conviction of a conscientious young woman that 
Boswell gives a wholly wrong impression of Johnson, for as a matter 
of fact nearly everything that we know of Johnson comes from 
Boswell. A common attitude is for students to apologize for their 
authors — for Franklin, say, or Poe — a thing that seems to be 
quite irrelevant. Students will gravely discuss the question as to 
whether Emma is a better character than Romola, wholly for- 
getting to discriminate between the artistic problem involved and 
the personal reaction, and assuming too blithely that the two are 
really comparable. Again, a young critic will be disappointed 
because Maggie Tulliver "is different from what we expected." 
Strictly a reader has no business to expect anything different from 
what the writer chooses to give him ; the reader is not bound to like 
the feast, but that is his fault for having his expectations too keen. 
Or rather it is the fault of the teacher from too much preliminary 
praise. The main point is that young writers, when they commit 
any such typical faults as have been mentioned, when they fall into 
vagueness, or when they make sweeping assertions, err in that they 
do not canvass the ground to see what is really possible and legiti- 
mate, logical and honest, for them to know. As an eradicator of 
such intellectual sins, a course in criticism is very valuable. "What 
does it mean?" is the great question to ask. 

As to the rhetorical side of the matter, the chief trouble seems 
to be that young writers try to say too many things, not only with 
resulting vagueness, but a generally scattering effect. Too many 
points — that is a thing to be avoided and shunned. One small 
train of thought is about all that anybody can manage in the course 
of five hundred or one thousand words, the usual length for college 
exercises. Against the desirable centrality of effect, there operates 
the patchwork spirit. It is typical, widely so, for students to begin 
with an introduction — " a kind of an introduction " is the term that 
usually describes it. This, however, seldom introduces: the idea 
comes to a close, an impasse is formed, into the head wall of which 
the writer butts ; he has to fall back to a new subject in paragraph 
two. This is often a summary of the work under discussion, and 
in itself it may be a good one ; the trouble is that it has no necessary 
connection with the comment to follow. A summary is really 
nothing but the necessary exposition of what is under discussion, 
and should accordingly be written with that in view. It is not a 



INTRODUCTION XXXI 

mere appanage, but an integral part of the whole composition. 
Bagehot's well-known summary of Enoch Arden l is an excellent 
example of how a summary may be subordinated to the central 
idea. Another common way to produce a scattering effect is 
to use the term "some" as a qualifying adjective to the title: 
out of a complete and possible ten, say, topics connected with the 
subject, you may use at random numbers, 5, 3, and 8 — a thing 
which happens in many themes. 

The only possible motive for mentioning these and other typical 
faults which will occur to every experienced teacher, is to aid in the 
avoidance of them, to help the student to think more clearly. 
The only safe assumption in the teaching of composition is that 
the young writer has something to say which he wishes to say to 
somebody. To train him to express his idea and to express it in 
a way that somebody else will understand and be interested in is, 
of course, the only end of instruction in composition, — that is, 
after the most elementary training is done. 

A word, therefore, of a more positive kind may be added. In 
single themes of a critical sort, it is well to pin the student down to 
definite answers to the three immemorial questions of Coleridge : 
What has the author tried to do? How has he done it? Is it 
worth doing ? The answers will involve a good deal of thinking, 
and considerable additional skill will have to be employed to make 
them compose into a fluent and solid piece of work. They ad- 
mirably serve to put a writer into leading strings and to give him 
his structure. They are also sound, in that they take into account 
the author's point of view in criticising his work. 

A more extended program may be offered to advanced students. 
It is not a bad plan — subject, of course, to many modifications 
of detail — to make the study of one author for each student 
the basis of a term's writing. The author should naturally be 
one for whom the student has some previous liking, and he should 
be of medium size. Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, are altogether 
too large and too much has been said about them. On the other 
hand it is doubtful if luminaries of the magnitude of Mrs. Hemans, 
"Barry Cornwall," Allan Ramsay, Eugene Field, E. R. Sill, even 
Holmes, are sufficiently bright to lighten the way of most students 
over the trackless path of a term of months. DeQuincey, Lowell, 

1 Literary Studies, Vol. II; Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or Pure, 
Ornate, and Grotesque Art in Poetry. Cf. G. R. Carpenter and W. T. Brewster, 
Modern English Prose. 



xxxii INTRODUCTION 

George Eliot, and such writers, where they are not too much 
talked about, are. more ponderable. It is a wholesome practice, 
by way of introduction, to ask each student, without referring to 
any book of comment, to set down, in a preliminary theme, what 
he knows or deems it essential to say about the author he has 
chosen. There should properly follow a compact biography of the 
author, a plain matter of ascertainable fact, well arranged and 
divided, without criticism. This is no easy task ; for biographies 
by young writers are likely to be top-heavy and lumpy. A third 
essay might properly be a classification of the author's works, with 
a view to bringing out the forms that he uses, their relative impor- 
tance, and the range of his ideas. It may be remarked in passing 
that literary classification is a stumbling-block to many writers. 
It seems easy, but to find, in practice, some fit scheme for bringing 
out the ideas and forms of an author is no such matter. To name 
a type, properly to characterize and illustrate it, and to list the 
specific writings that fall under the class — the essentials of good 
classification in literature — is often very baffling. Such classi- 
fication may be based on the author's life, as with .Lamb and 
Addison, whose careers were experiments in various literary forms, 
of which one was eminently successful; it may be based on the 
occasion of his writing, as with Swift, who was very nearly uniformly 
successful in all that he did after he was once started on his literary 
way ; it may be a matter of substance, as with the somewhat 
elaborate classification of DeQuincey's writings in this volume. 
There are other appropriate ways. 

With a good classification as a basis, a variety of possibilities 
offers itself. A fourth theme may be written on a man's ideas, 
if the intellectual side is the stronger, or on his quality if it 
is his literary feeling that predominates. That which distin- 
guishes him from other writers of his class, intellectually and 
spiritually, is surely a thing worth exposition. Another impor- 
tant source of material for a theme is found in the author's literary 
art, his method of approaching his task, his style, considered 
as a combination of phenomena. What things are characteristic 
and constant in the writings of Arnold, or Keats, or Landor? 
Naturally discussion of these points tends to run off into questions 
of quality, but the two may approximately be kept apart. Any 
criticism that the student has to offer, either by way of personal 
impression or impersonal discussion, is a good subject for another 
essay. Here, experience shows, students are likely to forget what 



INTRODUCTION xxxiii 

they have been talking about in their preceding themes : in biog- 
raphy, classification, and account of quality, a student may have 
shown George Eliot, say, to be a great moralist; and yet the criti- 
cism may have nothing to do with the ethics of George Eliot but may 
deal with the irrelevant question of the mechanics of her verse. In 
short, one should criticise along the lines indicated by the classi- 
fication and not abjure all preceding labour and knowledge. With 
regard to another theme, it is most important of all that a student 
should learn to state, just as a plain matter of fact, what is the vogue, 
the estimation, the place, etc., in which his author is held. Such 
" collective" criticism requires considerable research, but is a 
most necessary check to one's own judgment. 

Any special program is, of course, merely by way of illustra- 
tion and suggestion ; the main point is that young writers will 
avoid the production of rubbish in criticism, only by following 
sound expository and argumentative methods. The good critic, 
like other good men, is doubtless more born than made; but 
there is no real reason why any painstaking student may not learn 
clearly, adequately, and in an interesting way, to express the faith 
that is in him. If the foregoing argument is sound, the fact 
that criticism is largely nothing more than the expression of 
personal, often temperamental, opinion, — checked, for the better 
part, by historical and rational tests, — this fact should make the 
young critic more confident of his own views and, at the same 
time, more willing to modify them and to test them. 



I 



LESLIE STEPHEN 
(1832-1904) 

wood's halfpence 

[Chapter VII. of the Life of Swift in the English Men of Letters Series] 

In one of Scott's finest novels the old Cameronian preacher, who 
had been left for dead by Claverhouse's troopers, suddenly rises 
to confront his conquerors, and spends his last breath in denounc- 
ing the oppressors of the saints. Even such an apparition was 
Jonathan Swift to comfortable Whigs who were flourishing in the 
place of Harley and St. John, when, after ten years' quiescence, 
he suddenly stepped into the political arena. After the first 
crushing fall he had abandoned partial hope, and contented him- 
self with establishing supremacy in his chapter. But undying 
wrath smouldered in his breast till time came for an outburst. 

No man had ever learnt more thoroughly the lesson, "Put not 
your faith in princes ; " or had been impressed with a lower esti- 
mate of the wisdom displayed by the rulers of the world. He had 
been behind the scenes, and knew that the wisdom of great min- 
isters meant just enough cunning to court the ruin which a little 
common sense would have avoided. Corruption was at the prow 
and folly at the helm. The selfish ring which he had denounced 
so fiercely had triumphed. It had triumphed, as he held, by 
flattering the new dynasty, hoodwinking the nation, and maligning 
its antagonists. The cynical theory of politics was not for him, 
as for some comfortable cynics, an abstract proposition, which 
mattered very little to a sensible man, but was embodied in the 
bitter wrath with which he regarded his triumphant adversaries. 
Pessimism is perfectly compatible with bland enjoyment of the 
good things in a bad world; but Swift's pessimism was not of this 



2 LESLIE STEPHEN 

type. It meant energetic hatred of definite things and people who 
were always before him. 

With this feeling he had come to Ireland; and Ireland — I am 
speaking of a century and a half ago — was the opprobrium of 
English statesmanship. There Swift had (or thought he had) 
always before him a concrete example of the basest form of tyranny. 
By Ireland, I have said, Swift meant, in the first place, the Eng- 
lish in Ireland. In the last years of his sanity he protested indig- 
nantly against the confusion between the "savage old Irish" and 
the English gentry, who, he said, were much better bred, spoke 
better English, and were more civilized than the inhabitants of 
many English counties. 1 He retained to the end of his life his 
antipathy to the Scotch colonists. He opposed their demand for 
political equality as fiercely in the last as in his first political utter- 
ances. He contrasted them unfavourably 2 with the Catholics, 
who had, indeed, been driven to revolt by massacre and confisca- 
tion under Puritan rule, but who were now, he declared, "true 
Whigs, in the best and most proper sense of the word," and 
thoroughly loyal to the house of Hanover. Had there been a 
danger of a Catholic revolt, Swift's feelings might have been differ- 
ent; but he always held that they were "as inconsiderable as 
the women and children," mere "hewers of wood and drawers of 
water," "out of all capacity of doing any mischief, if they were 
ever so well inclined." 3 Looking at them in this way, he felt 
a sincere compassion for their misery and a bitter resentment 
against their oppressors. The English, he said in a remarkable 
letter, 4 should be ashamed of their reproaches of Irish dulness, 
ignorance, and cowardice. Those defects were the products of 
slavery. He declared that the poor cottagers had "a much better 
natural taste for good sense, humour, and raillery than ever I 
observed among people of the like sort in England. But the mil- 
lions of oppressions they lie under, the tyranny of their landlords, 
the ridiculous zeal of their priests, and the misery of the whole 
nation, have been enough to damp the best spirits under the sun." 
Such a view is now commonplace enough. It was then a heresy to 
English statesmen, who thought that nobody but a Papist or a 
Jacobite could object to the tyranny of Whigs. 

Swift's diagnosis of the chronic Irish disease was thoroughly 
political. He considered that Irish misery sprang from the sub- 

1 Letter to Pope, July 13, 1737. 3 Letters on Sacramental Test in 1738. 

2 Catholic Reasons for Repealing the Test. 4 To Sir Charles Wigan, July, 1732. 



WOOD'S HALFPENCE 3 

jection to a government not intentionally cruel, but absolutely 
selfish; to which the Irish revenue meant so much convenient 
political plunder, and which acted on the principle quoted from 
Cowley, that the happiness of Ireland should not weigh against 
the "least conveniency" of England. He summed up his views 
in a remarkable letter, 1 to be presently mentioned, the substance 
of which had been orally communicated to Walpole. He said to 
Walpole, as he said in every published utterance : first, that the 
colonists were still Englishmen, and entitled to English rights; 
secondly, that their trade was deliberately crushed, purely for the 
benefit of the English of England ; thirdly, that all valuable pre- 
ferments were bestowed upon men born in England, as a matter of 
course ; and, finally, that in consequence of this the upper classes, 
deprived of all other openings, were forced to rack-rent their 
tenants to such a degree that not one farmer in the kingdom out 
of a hundred "could afford shoes or stockings to his children, or 
to eat flesh or drink anything better than sour milk and water 
twice in a year; so that the whole country, except the Scotch 
plantation in the north, is a scene of misery and desolation hardly 
to be matched on this side Lapland." A modern reformer would 
give the first and chief place to this social misery. It is charac- 
teristic that Swift comes to it as a consequence from the injustice 
to his own class : as, again, that he appeals to Walpole, not on the 
simple ground that the people are wretched, but on the ground that 
they will be soon unable to pay the tribute to England, which he 
reckons at a million a year. But his conclusion might be accepted 
by any Irish patriot. Whatever, he says, can make a country poor 
and despicable concurs in the case of Ireland. The nation is con- 
trolled by laws to which it does not consent ; disowned by its breth- 
ren and countrymen; refused the liberty of trading even in its 
natural commodities; forced to seek for justice many hundred 
miles by sea and land; rendered in a manner incapable of serv- 
ing the King and country in any place of honour, trust, or profit ; 
whilst the governors have no sympathy with the governed, except 
what may occasionally arise from the sense of justice and philan- 
thropy. 

I am not to ask how far Swift was right in his judgments. 
Every line which he wrote shows that he was thoroughly sincere 
and profoundly stirred by his convictions. A remarkable pam- 
phlet, published in 1720, contained his first utterance upon the 
1 To Lord Peterborough, April 21, 1726. 



4 LESLIE STEPHEN 

subject. It is an exhortation to the Irish to use only Irish manu- 
factures. He applies to Ireland the fable of Arachne and Pallas. 
The goddess, indignant at being equalled in spinning, turned her 
rival into a spider, to spin forever out of her own bowels in a 
narrow compass. He always, he says, pitied poor Arachne for so 
cruel and unjust a sentence, " which, however, is fully executed 
upon us by England with further additions of rigour and severity ; 
for the greatest part of our bowels and vitals is extracted, without 
allowing us the liberty of spinning and weaving them." Swift 
of course accepts the economic fallacy equally taken for granted 
by his opponents, and fails to see that England and Ireland in- 
jured themselves as well as each other by refusing to interchange 
their productions. But he utters forcibly his righteous indig- 
nation against the contemptuous injustice of the English rulers, 
in consequence of which the "miserable people" are being re- 
duced "to a worse condition than the peasants in France, or the 
vassals in Germany and Poland." Slaves, he says, have a natural 
disposition to be tyrants; and he himself, when his betters give 
him a kick, is apt to revenge it with six upon his footman. That 
is how the landlords treat their tenantry. 

The printer of this pamphlet was prosecuted. The chief 
justice (Whitshed) sent back the jury nine times and kept them 
eleven hours before they would consent to bring in a "special 
verdict." The unpopularity of the prosecution became so great 
that it was at last dropped. Four years afterwards a more violent 
agitation broke out. A patent had been given to a certain William 
Wood for supplying Ireland with a copper coinage.^ Many com- 
plaints had been made, and in September, 1723, addresses were 
voted by the Irish Houses of Parliament, declaring that the patent 
had been obtained by clandestine and false representations; 
that it was mischievous to the country ; and that Wood had been 
guilty of frauds in his coinage. They were pacified by vague 
promises; but Walpole went on with the scheme on the strength 
of a favourable report of a committee of the Privy Council; and 
the excitement was already serious when (in 1724) Swift published 
the Drapiefs Letters, which give him his chief title to eminence 
as a patriotic agitator. 

Swift either shared or took advantage of the general belief that 
the mysteries of the currency are unfathomable to the human 
intelligence. They have to do with that world of financial magic 
in which wealth may be made out of paper, and all ordinary 



WOOD'S HALFPENCE 5 

relations of cause and effect are suspended. There is, however, 
no real mystery about the halfpence. The small coins which 
do not form part of the legal tender may be considered primarily 
as counters. A penny is a penny, so long as twelve are change 
for a shilling. It is not in the least necessary for this purpose 
that the copper contained in the twelve penny pieces should be 
worth or nearly worth a shilling. A sovereign can never be worth 
much more than the gold of which it is made. But at the present 
day bronze worth only twopence is coined into twelve penny pieces. 1 
The coined bronze is worth six times as much as the uncoined. 
The small coins must have some intrinsic value to deter forgery, 
and must be made of good materials to stand wear and tear. If 
these conditions be observed, and a proper number be issued, the 
value of the penny will be no more affected by the value of the 
copper than the value of the banknote by that of the paper on 
which it is written. This opinion assumes that the copper coins 
cannot be offered or demanded in payment of any but trifling 
debts. The halfpence coined by Wood seem to have fulfilled 
these conditions, and as copper worth twopence (on the lowest 
computation) was coined into ten halfpence, worth fivepence, 
their intrinsic value was more than double that of modern half- 
pence. 

The halfpence, then, were not objectionable upon this ground. 
Nay, it would have been wasteful to make them more valuable. 
It would have been as foolish to use more copper for the pence 
as to make the works of a watch of gold if brass is equally dur- 
able and convenient. But another consequence is equally clear. 
The effect of Wood's patent was that a mass of copper worth 
about 6o,ooo/. 2 became worth 100,800/. in the shape of halfpenny 
pieces. There was, therefore, a balance of about 40,000/. to pay 
for the expenses of coinage. It would have been waste to get 
rid of this by putting more copper in the coins ; but, if so large a 
profit arose from the transaction, it would go to somebody. At 
the present day it would be brought into the national treasury. 
This was not the way in which business was done in Ireland. 



1 The ton of bronze, I am informed, is coined into 108,000 pence; that is, 450/. 
The metal is worth about 74/. 

2 Simon, in his work on the Irish coinage, makes the profit 60,000/. ; but he 
reckons the copper at is. a pound, whereas from the Report of the Privy Council 
it would seem to be properly is. 6d. a pound. Swift and most later writers say 
108,000/., but the right sum is 100,800/. — 360 tons coined into 2s. 6d. a pound. 



6 LESLIE STEPHEN 

Wood was to pay iooo/. a year for fourteen years to the Crown. 1 
But 14,000/. still leaves a large margin for profit. What was to 
become of it? According to the admiring biographer of Sir R. 
Walpole the patent had been originally given by Lord Sunderland 
to the Duchess of Kendal, a lady whom the King delighted to 
honour. She already received 3000/. a year in pensions upon 
the Irish Establishment, and she sold this patent to Wood for 
10,000/. Enough was still left to give Wood a handsome profit; 
as in transactions of this kind every accomplice in a dirty business 
expects to be well paid. So handsome, indeed, was the profit 
that Wood received ultimately a pension of 3000/. for eight years — 
24,000/., that is — in consideration of abandoning the patent. 
It was right and proper that a profit should be made on the trans- 
action, but shameful that it should be divided between the King's 
mistress and William Wood, and that the bargain should be struck 
without consulting the Irish representatives, and maintained in 
spite of their protests. The Duchess of Kendal was to be allowed 
to take a share of the wretched halfpence in the pocket of every 
Irish beggar. A more disgraceful transaction could hardly be 
imagined, or one more calculated to justify Swift's view of the 
selfishness and corruption of the English rulers. 

Swift saw his chance, and went to work in characteristic fashion, 
with unscrupulous audacity of statement, guided by the keenest 
strategical instinct. He struck at the heart as vigorously as he 
had done in the Examiner, but with resentment sharpened by 
ten years of exile. It was not safe to speak of the Duchess of 
Kendal's share in the transaction, though the story, as poor Arch- 
deacon Coxe pathetically declares, was industriously propagated. 
But the case against Wood was all the stronger. Is he so wicked, 
asks Swift, as to suppose that a nation is to be ruined that he may 
gain three or four score thousand pounds? Hampden went to 
prison, he says, rather than pay a few shillings wrongfully; I, says 
Swift, would rather be hanged than have all my " property taxed 
at seventeen shillings in the pound at the arbitrary will and pleasure 
of the venerable Mr. Wood." A simple constitutional precedent 
might rouse a Hampden; but to stir a popular agitation it is as 
well to show that the evil actually inflicted is gigantic, indepen- 
dently of possible results. It requires, indeed, some audacity 
to prove that debasement of the copper currency can amount to 

1 Monck Mason says only 300/. a year, but this is the sum mentioned in the 
Report and by Swift. 



WOOD'S HALFPENCE 7 

a tax of seventeen shillings in the pound on all property. Here, 
however, Swift might simply throw the reins upon the neck of 
his fancy. Anybody may make any inferences he pleases in the 
mysterious regions of currency; and no inferences, it seems, were 
too audacious for his hearers, though we are left to doubt how 
far Swift's wrath had generated delusions in his own mind, and 
how far he perceived that other minds were ready to be deluded. 
He revels in prophesying the most extravagant consequences. 
The country will be undone ; the tenants will not be able to pay 
their rents; "the farmers must rob, or beg, or leave the country; 
the shopkeepers in this and every other town must break or starve ; 
the squire will hoard up all his good money to send to England 
and keep some poor tailor or weaver in his house, who will be 
glad to get bread at any rate." 1 Concrete facts are given to help 
the imagination. Squire Connolly must have 250 horses to bring 
his half-yearly rents to town ; and the poor man will have to pay 
thirty-six of Wood's halfpence to get a quart of twopenny ale. 

How is this proved? One argument is a sufficient specimen. 
Nobody, according to the patent, was to be forced to take Wood's 
halfpence; nor could any one be obliged to receive more than 
fivepence halfpenny in any one payment. This, of course, meant 
that the halfpence could only be used as change, and a man must 
pay his debts in silver or gold whenever it was possible to use a 
sixpence. It upsets Swift's statement about Squire Connolly's 
rents. But Swift is equal to the emergency. The rule means, 
he says, that every man must take fivepence halfpenny in every 
payment, if it be offered; which, on the next page, becomes simply 
in every payment; therefore, making an easy assumption or two, 
he reckons that you will receive 160/. a year in these halfpence; 
and therefore (by other assumptions) lose 140/. a year. 2 It might 
have occurred to Swift, one would think, that both parties to the 
transaction could not possibly be losers. But he calmly assumes 
that the man who pays will lose in proportion to the increased 
number of coins ; and the man who receives, in proportion to the 
depreciated value of each coin. He does not see, or think it worth 
notice, that the two losses obviously counterbalance each other; 
and he has an easy road to prophesying absolute ruin for every- 
body. It would be almost as great a compliment to call this 
sophistry as to dignify with the name of satire a round assertion 
that an honest man is a cheat or a rogue. 

1 Letter I. 2 Letter II. 



8 LESLIE STEPHEN 

The real grievance, however, shows through the sham argument. 
"It is no loss of honour," thought Swift, "to submit to the lion; 
but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being 
devoured alive by a rat?" Why should Wood have this profit 
(even if more reasonably estimated) in defiance of the wishes of 
the nation ? It is, says Swift, because he is an Englishman and 
has great friends. He proposes to meet the attempt by a general 
agreement not to take the halfpence. Briefly, the halfpence were 
to be "Boycotted." 

Before this second letter was written the English ministers had 
become alarmed. A report of the Privy Council (July 24, 1724) 
defended the patent, but ended by recommending that the amount 
to be coined should be reduced to 40,000/. Carteret was sent out 
as Lord Lieutenant to get this compromise accepted. Swift 
replied by a third letter, arguing the question of the patent, which 
he can "never suppose," or, in other words, which everybody knew, 
to have been granted as a "job for the interest of some particular 
person." He vigorously asserts that the patent can never make 
it obligatory to accept the halfpence, and tells a story much to 
the purpose from old Leicester experience. The justices had 
reduced the price of ale to three-halfpence a quart. One of them, 
therefore, requested that they would make another order to appoint 
who should drink it, "for, by God," said he, "I will not." 

The argument thus naturally led to a further and more impor- 
tant question. The discussion as to the patent brought forward 
the question of right. Wood and his friends, according to Swift, 
had begun to declare that the resistance meant Jacobitism and 
rebellion; they asserted that the Irish were ready to shake off 
their dependence upon the Crown of England. Swift took up 
the challenge and answered resolutely and eloquently. He took 
up the broadest ground. Ireland, he declared, depended upon 
England in no other sense than that in which England depended 
upon Ireland. Whoever thinks otherwise, he said, "I, M. B. 
Drapier, desire to be excepted; for I declare, next under God, I 
depend only on the King my sovereign, and the laws of my own 
country. I am so far," he added, "from depending upon the 
people of England, that, if they should rebel, I would take arms 
and lose every drop of my blood to hinder the Pretender from 
being King of Ireland." 

It had been reported that somebody (Walpole presumably) 
had sworn to thrust the halfpence down the throats of the Irish. 



WOOD'S HALFPENCE g 

The remedy, replied Swift, is totally in your own hands, "and 
therefore I have digressed a little ... to let you see that by 
the laws of God, of nature, of nations, and of your own country, 
you are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in Eng- 
land." As Swift had already said in the third letter, no one could 
believe that any English patent would stand half an hour after an 
address from the English Houses of Parliament such as that 
which had been passed against Wood's by the Irish Parliament. 
Whatever constitutional doubts might be raised, it was, therefore, 
come to be the plain question whether or not the English ministers 
should simply override the wishes of the Irish nation. 

Carteret, upon landing, began by trying to suppress his adver- 
sary. A reward of 300/. was offered for the discovery of the author 
of the fourth letter. A prosecution was ordered against the 
printer. Swift went to the levee of the Lord Lieutenant, and 
reproached him bitterly for his severity against a poor tradesman 
who had published papers for the good of his country. Carteret 
answered in a happy quotation from Virgil, a feat which always 
seems to have brought consolation to the statesman of that 
day: — 

"Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt 
Moliri." x 

Another story is more characteristic. Swift's butler had acted as 
his amanuensis, and absented himself one night whilst the proc- 
lamation was running. Swift thought that the butler was either 
treacherous or presuming upon his knowledge of the secret. As 
soon as the man returned he ordered him to strip off his livery 
and begone. "I am in your power," he said, "and for that very 
reason I will not stand your insolence." The poor butler departed, 
but preserved his fidelity; and Swift, when the tempest had 
blown over, rewarded him by appointing him verger in the cathe- 
dral. The grand jury threw out the bill against the printer in 
spite of all Whitshed's efforts; they were discharged; and the 
next grand jury presented Wood's halfpence as a nuisance. Car- 
teret gave way, the patent was surrendered, and Swift might 
congratulate himself upon a complete victory. 

The conclusion is in one respect rather absurd. The Irish 
succeeded in rejecting a real benefit at the cost of paying Wood 

1 [The savage state of affairs and the rawness of the realm compel me to do 
such things.] 



IO LESLIE STEPHEN 

the profit which he would have made, had he been allowed to 
confer it. Another point must be admitted. Swift's audacious 
misstatements were successful for the time in rousing the spirit 
of the people. They have led, however, to a very erroneous 
estimate of the whole case. English statesmen and historians l 
have found it so easy to expose his errors that they have thought 
his whole case absurd. The grievance was not what it was repre- 
sented; therefore it is argued that there was no grievance. The 
very essence of the case was that the Irish people were to be plun- 
dered by the German mistress; and such plunder was possible 
because the English people, as Swift says, never thought of Ire- 
land except when there was nothing else to be talked of in the 
coffee-houses. 2 Owing to the conditions of the controversy this 
grievance only came out gradually, and could never be fully 
stated. Swift could never do more than hint at the transaction. 
His letters (including three which appeared after the last men- 
tioned, enforcing the same case) have often been cited as models 
of eloquence, and compared to Demosthenes. We must make 
some deduction from this, as in the case of his former political 
pamphlets. The intensity of his absorption in the immediate end 
deprives them of some literary merits ; and we, to whom the soph- 
istries are palpable enough, are apt to resent them. Anybody 
can be effective in a way, if he chooses to lie boldly. Yet, in 
another sense, it is hard to over-praise the letters. They have 
in a high degree the peculiar stamp of Swift's genius : the vein 
of the most nervous common-sense and pithy assertion, with an 
undercurrent of intense passion, the more impressive because it 
is never allowed to exhale in mere rhetoric. 

Swift's success, the dauntless front which he had shown to 
the oppressor, made him the idol of his countrymen. A Drapier's 
Club was formed in his honour, which collected the letters and 
drank toasts and sang songs to celebrate their hero. In a sad 
letter to Pope, in 1737, he complains that none of his equals care 
for him; but adds that as he walks the streets he has "a thousand 
hats and blessings upon old scores which those we call the gentry 
have forgot." The people received him as their champion. When 
he returned from England, in 1726, bells were rung, bonfires 
lighted, and a guard of honour escorted him to the deanery. 

1 See, for example, Lord Stanhope's account. For the other view see Mr. 
Lecky's History of the Eighteenth Century and Mr. Froude's English in Ireland. 

2 Letter IV. 



WOOD'S HALFPENCE II 

Towns voted him their freedom and received him like a prince. 
When Walpole spoke of arresting him a prudent friend told the 
minister that the messenger would require a guard of ten thou- 
sand soldiers. Corporations asked his advice in elections, and 
the weavers appealed to him on questions about their trade. In 
one of his satires * Swift had attacked a certain Sergeant Bettes- 
worth : — 

"Thus at the bar the booby Bettesworth, 
Though half-a-crown o'erpays his sweat's worth." 

Bettesworth called upon him with, as Swift reports, a knife in 
his pocket, and complained in such terms as to imply some inten- 
tion of personal violence. The neighbours instantly sent a deputa- 
tion to the Dean, proposing to take vengeance upon Bettesworth; 
and though he induced them to disperse peaceably, they formed 
a guard to watch the house; and Bettesworth complained that 
his attack upon the Dean had lowered his professional income 
by 1200I. a year. A quaint example of his popularity is given 
by Sheridan. A great crowd had collected to see an eclipse. 
Swift thereupon sent out the bellman to give notice that the eclipse 
had been postponed by the Dean's orders, and the crowd dis- 
persed. 

Influence with the people, however, could not bring Swift 
back to power. At one time there seemed to be a gleam of hope. 
Swift visited England twice in 1726 and 1727. He paid long 
visits to his old friend Pope, and again met Bolingbroke, now 
returned from exile, and trying to make a place in English politics. 
Peterborough introduced the Dean to Walpole, to whom Swift 
detailed his views upon Irish politics. Walpole was the last 
man to set about a great reform from mere considerations of 
justice and philanthropy, and was not likely to trust a confidant 
of Bolingbroke. He was civil but indifferent. Swift, however, 
was introduced by his friends to Mrs. Howard, the mistress of 
the Prince of Wales, soon to become George II. The Princess, 
afterwards Queen Caroline, ordered Swift to come and see her, 
and he complied, as he says, after nine commands. He told her 
that she had lately seen a wild boy from Germany, and now he 
supposed she wanted to see a wild Dean from Ireland. Some 
civilities passed; Swift offered some plaids of Irish manufacture, 
and the Princess promised some medals in return. When, in 

1 "On the words Brother Protestants, &c." 



12 LESLIE STEPHEN 

the next year, George I. died, the Opposition hoped great things 
from the change. Pulteney had tried to get Swift's powerful 
help for the Craftsman, the Opposition organ; and the Opposi- 
tion hoped to upset Walpole. Swift, who had thought of going 
to France for his health, asked Mrs. Howard's advice. She recom- 
mended him to stay ; and he took the recommendation as amount- 
ing to a promise of support. He had some hopes of obtaining 
English preferment in exchange for his deanery in what he calls 
(in the date to one of his letters x ) "wre-tched Dublin in miserable 
Ireland." It soon appeared, however, that the mistress was 
powerless ; and that Walpole was to be as firm as ever in his seat. 
Swift returned to Ireland, never again to leave it: to lose soon 
afterwards his beloved Stella, and nurse an additional grudge 
against courts and favourites. 

The bitterness with which he resented Mrs. Howard's supposed 
faithlessness is painfully illustrative, in truth, of the morbid state 
of mind which was growing upon him. "You think," he says 
to Bolingbroke in 1729, " as I ought to think, that it is time for me 
to have done with the world ; and so I would, if I could get into 
a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a 
rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole." That terrible phrase ex- 
presses but too vividly the state of mind which was now becoming 
familiar to him. Separated by death and absence from his best 
friends, and tormented by increasing illness, he looked out upon 
a state of things in which he could see no ground for hope. The 
resistance to Wood's halfpence had staved off immediate ruin, 
but had not cured the fundamental evil. Some tracts upon Irish 
affairs, written after the Drapier's Letters, sufficiently indicate 
his despairing vein. "I am," he says in 1737, when proposing 
some remedy for the swarms of beggars in Dublin, "a desponder 
by nature;" and he has found out that the people will never stir 
themselves to remove a single grievance. His old prejudices 
were as keen as ever, and could dictate personal outbursts. He 
attacked the bishops bitterly for offering certain measures which 
in his view sacrificed the permanent interests of the Church to 
that of the actual occupants. He showed his own sincerity by 
refusing to take fines for leases which would have benefited him- 
self at the expense of his successors. With equal earnestness 
he still clung to the Test Acts, and assailed the Protestant Dis- 
senters with all his old bitterness, and ridiculed their claims to 

1 To Lord Stafford, November 26, 1725. 



WOOD'S HALFPENCE 13 

brotherhood with Churchmen. To the end he was a Churchman 
before everything. One of the last of his poetical performances 
was prompted by the sanction given by the Irish Parliament to 
an opposition to certain "titles of ejectment." He had defended 
the right of the Irish Parliament against English rulers; but 
when it attacked the interests of his Church his fury showed itself 
in the most savage satire that he ever wrote, the Legion Club. It 
is an explosion of wrath tinged with madness : — 

"Could I from the building's top 
Hear the rattling thunder drop, 
While the devil upon the roof 
(If the devil be thunder-proof) 
Should with poker fiery red 
Crack the stones and melt the lead, 
Drive them down on every skull 
When the den of thieves is full; 
Quite destroy the harpies' nest, 
How might this our isle be blest!" 

What follows fully keeps up to this level. Swift flings filth like 
a maniac, plunges into ferocious personalities, and ends fitly with 
the execration — 

"May their God, the devil, confound them!" 

He was seized with one of his fits whilst writing the poem, and was 
never afterwards capable of sustained composition. 

Some further pamphlets — especially one on the State of Ireland 
— repeat and enforce his views. One of them requires special 
mention. The Modest Proposal (written in 1729) for Preventing 
the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their 
Parents or Country — the proposal being that they should be turned 
into articles of food — gives the very essence of Swift's feeling, 
and is one of the most tremendous pieces of satire in existence. It 
shows the quality already noticed. Swift is burning with a passion 
the glow of which makes other passions look cold, as it is said that 
some bright lights cause other illuminating objects to cast a shadow. 
Yet his face is absolutely grave, and he details his plan as calmly as 
a modern projector suggesting the importation of Australian meat. 
The superficial coolness may be revolting to tender-hearted people, 
and has, indeed, led to condemnation of the supposed ferocity of 
the author almost as surprising as the criticisms which can see 
in it nothing but an exquisite piece of humour. It is, in truth, 



14 LESLIE STEPHEN 

fearful to read even now. Yet we can forgive and even sympathize 
when we take it for what it really is — the most complete expression 
of burning indignation against intolerable wrongs. It utters, in- 
deed, a serious conviction. "I confess myself," says Swift in a 
remarkable paper, 1 "to be touched with a very sensible pleasure 
when I hear of a mortality in any country parish or village, where 
the wretches are forced to pay for a filthy cabin and two ridges 
of potatoes treble the worth ; brought up to steal and beg for want 
of work; to whom death would be the best thing to be wished for, 
on account both of themselves and the public." He remarks in 
the same place on the lamentable contradiction presented in Ire- 
land to the maxim that the "people are the riches of a nation," 
and the Modest Proposal is the fullest comment on this melancholy 
reflection. After many visionary proposals he has at last hit upon 
the plan, which has at least the advantage that by adopting it "we 
can incur no danger of disobliging England. For this kind of 
commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender 
a consistence to admit a long continuance in salt, although, per- 
haps, I could name a country which would be glad to eat up a whole 
nation without it." 

Swift once asked Delany 2 whether the "corruptions and villanies 
of men in power did not eat his flesh and exhaust his spirits?" 
"No," said Delany. "Why, how can you help it?" said Swift. 
"Because," replied Delany, "I am commanded to the contrary — 
fret not thyself because of the ungodly." That, like other wise max- 
ims, is capable of an ambiguous application. As Delany took it, 
Swift might perhaps have replied that it was a very comfortable 
maxim — for the ungodly. His own application of Scripture is 
different. It tells us, he says, in his proposal for using Irish manu- 
factures, that "oppression makes a wise man mad." If, therefore, 
some men are not mad, it must be because they are not wise. In 
truth, it is characteristic of Swift that he could never learn the great 
lesson of submission even to the inevitable. He could not, like 
an easy-going Delany, submit to oppression which might possibly 
be resisted with success; but as little could he submit when all 
resistance was hopeless. His rage, which could find no better 
outlet, burnt inwardly and drove him mad. It is very interesting 
to compare Swift's wrathful denunciations with Berkeley's treat- 
ment of the same before in the Querist (1735— '37). Berkeley is 

1 Maxims Controlled in Ireland. 2 Delany, p. 148. 



WOOD'S HALFPENCE 



*5 



full of luminous suggestions upon economical questions which are 
entirely beyond Swift's mark. He is in a region quite above the 
sophistries of the Drapiefs Letters. He sees equally the terrible 
grievance that no people in the world is so beggarly, wretched, 
and destitute as the common Irish. But he thinks all complaints 
against the English rule useless, and therefore foolish. If the Eng- 
lish restrain our trade ill-advisedly, is it not, he asks, plainly our 
interest to accommodate ourselves to them? (No. 136.) Have 
we not the advantage of English protection without sharing Eng- 
lish responsibilities? He asks "whether England doth not really 
love us and wish well to us as bone of her bone and flesh of her 
flesh? and whether it be not our part to cultivate this love and 
affection all manner of ways?" (Nos. 322, 323.) One can fancy 
how Swift must have received this characteristic suggestion of the 
admirable Berkeley, who could not bring himself to think ill of 
any one. Berkeley's main contention is, no doubt, sound in itself, 
namely, that the welfare of the country really depended on the 
industry and economy of its inhabitants, and that such qualities 
would have made the Irish comfortable in spite of all English 
restrictions and Government abuses. But, then, Swift might well 
have answered that such general maxims are idle. It is all very 
well for divines to tell people to become good, and to find out that 
then they will be happy. But how are they to be made good? 
Are the Irish intrinsically worse than other men, or is their laziness 
and restlessness due to special and removable circumstances? 
In the latter case is there not more real value in attacking tangible 
evils than in propounding general maxims and calling upon all men 
to submit to oppression, and even to believe in the oppressor's 
good-will, in the name of Christian charity? To answer those 
questions would be to plunge into interminable and hopeless con- 
troversies. Meanwhile, Swift's fierce indignation against English 
oppression might almost as well have been directed against a law 
of nature for any immediate result. Whether the rousing of the 
national spirit was any benefit is a question which I must leave to 
others. In any case, the work, however darkened by personal 
feeling or love of class-privilege, expressed as hearty a hatred of 
oppression as ever animated a human being. 



II 

DAVID MASSON 

(1822) 

DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS : CLASSIFICATION AND REVIEW 

[Chapter XII. of the Life of De Quincey in the English Men of Letters] 

How are De Quincey's writings to be classified ? His own classi- 
fication, propounded in the General Preface to the edition of his 
Collected Works, was to the effect that they might be distributed 
roughly into three sorts, — first, those papers of fact and reminis- 
cence the object of which was primarily to amuse the reader, though 
they might reach to a higher interest, e.g. the Autobiographic 
Sketches; secondly, essays proper, or papers addressing themselves 
purely or primarily to "the understanding as an insulated faculty," 
e.g. The Essenes, The Ccesars, and Cicero; and, thirdly, that "far 
higher class of compositions" which might be considered as exam- 
ples of a very rare kind of "impassioned prose," e.g. large portions 
of The Confessions of an Opium-Eater and the supplementary 
Suspiria de Profundis. This classification, though not quite the 
same as Bacon's division of the "parts of learning" (by which 
he meant "kinds of literature") into History or the Literature 
of Memory, Philosophy or the Literature of Reason, and Poetry 
or the Literature of Imagination, is practically equivalent. 
Hence, as Bacon's classification is the more scientific and 
searching, and also the most familiar and popular, we shall be 
pretty safe in adopting it, and dividing De Quincey's writings into : 
— (I.) Writings of Reminiscence, or Descriptive, Biographical, 
and Historical Writings; (II.) Speculative, Didactic, and Critical 
Writings; (III.) Imaginative Writings and Prose-Poetry. It is 
necessary, above all things, to premise that in De Quincey the three 
sorts of writing shade continually into each other. Where this 

16 



DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 1 7 

difficulty of the constant blending of kinds in one and the same 
paper is not met by the obvious preponderance of one of the kinds, 
it may be obviated by naming some papers in more divisions than 
one. With that understanding, we proceed to a classified synopsis 
of De Quincey's literary remains : — 

I. DESCRIPTIVE, BIOGRAPHICAL, AND HISTORICAL 

The writings of this class may be enumerated and subdivided 
as follows : — 

I. Autobiographic : — Specially of this kind are The Confessions of an 
English Opium-Eater and the Autobiographic Sketches; but autobiographic 
matter is dispersed through other papers. 

II. Biographic Sketches of Persons known to the Author: — ■ 
Some such are included in the autobiographic writings; but distinct papers 
of the kind are Recollections of the Lake Poets, or Sketches of Coleridge, Words- 
worth, and Southey, and the articles entitled Coleridge and Opium-Eating, 
Charles Lamb, Professor Wilson, Sir William Hamilton, Walking Stewart, 
Note on Hazlitt, and Dr. Parr, or Whiggism in its Relations to Literature. 
All these papers are partly critical. Several papers of the same sort that 
appeared in magazines have not been reprinted in the Collective British 
Edition. 

III. Other Biographic Sketches : — Shakespeare (in Vol. XV.), 
Milton (in Vol. X.),Pope (in Vol. XV.), Richard Bentley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 
The Marquis Wellesley, Last Days of Immanuel Kant (a digest from the Ger- 
man), Lessing, Herder, Goethe (in Vol. XV.), Schiller. These also include 
criticism with biography. 

IV. Historical Sketches and Descriptions: — Homer and the 
Homeridce, Philosophy of Herodotus, Toilette of the Hebrew Lady (archaeo- 
logical), The Ccesars (in six chapters, forming the greater part of Vol IX.), 
Charlemagne, Revolt of the Tartars, The Revolution of Greece, Modern Greece, 
Ceylon, China (a little essay on the Chinese character, with illustrations), 
Modern Superstition, Anecdotage, French and English Manners, Account of 
the Williams Murders (the postscript to "Murder considered as one of the Fine 
Arts"). In the same sub-class we would include the two important papers 
entitled Rhetoric and Style; for, though to a considerable extent critical and 
didactic, they are, despite their titles, chiefly surveys of Literary History. 

V. Historical Speculations and Researches : — In this class may be 
included Cicero, The Casuistry of Roman Meals, Greece under the Romans, 
Judas Iscariot, The Essenes, The Pagan Oracles, Secret Societies, Historico- 
Critical Inquiry into the Origin of the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, jEHus 
Lamia. 

The two Autobiographic volumes and the volume of Reminis- 
cences of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, are among the 
best known of De Quincey's writings. Among the other bio- 



1 8 DAVID MASSON 

graphic sketches of persons known to him Charles Lamb, Walking 
Stewart, and Dr. Parr are those of the highest merit, — the last 
very severe and satirical, but full of interest and of marked ability. 
Of the. other biographic sketches the ablest and most interesting 
by far is Richard Bentley, a really splendid specimen of biography 
in miniature. The Encyclopaedia article on Shakespeare, though 
somewhat thin, deserves notice for the perfection of its propor- 
tions as a summary of what is essential in our information respect- 
ing Shakespeare's life. It is not yet superannuated. The similar 
article on Pope is interesting as an expression of De Quincey's 
generous admiration all in all of a poet whom he treats very severely 
in detail in some of his critical papers; and it is rare to meet so neat 
and workmanlike a little curiosity as the paper on The Marquis 
Wellesley. Of the personal sketches of eminent Germans, that 
entitled The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, though it is only a trans- 
lated digest from a German original, bears the palm for delicious 
richness of anecdote and vividness of portraiture. De Quincey's 
credit in it, except in so far as he shaped and changed and infused 
life while translating (which was a practice of his), rests on the fact 
that he was drawn to the subject by his powerful interest in Kant's 
philosophy, and conceived the happy idea of such a mode of 
creating among his countrymen a personal affection for the great 
abstract thinker. Some of the other German sketches, especially 
Lessing and Herder, have the same special merit of being early 
and useful attempts to introduce some knowledge of German 
thought and literature into England; but the Goethe, on all ac- 
counts, is discreditable. It exhibits De Quincey at about his very 
worst; for, though raising the estimate of Goethe's genius that 
had been announced in the earlier critical paper on his "Wilhelm 
Meister," it retains something of the malice of that paper. 

When we pass to the papers of historical description, it is 
hardly a surprise to find that it is De Quincey's tendency in such 
papers to run to disputed or momentous " points" and concentrate 
the attention on those. A magazine paper did not afford breadth 
of canvas enough for complete historical representation under 
such titles as he generally chose. No exception of the kind, indeed, 
can be taken to his Revolt of the Tartars, which is a noble effort 
of historical painting, done with a sweep and breadth of poetic 
imagination entitling it, though a history, to rank also among his 
prose-phantasies. Nor does the remark apply to the Account of 
the Williams Murders, which beats for ghastly power anything else 



DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 1 9 

known in Newgate Calendar literature. But the tendency to 
" points" is shown in most of the other papers in the same sub- 
class. Among these The Philosophy of Herodotus may be men- 
tioned for its singularly fine appreciation of the Grecian father of 
History, and Modern Greece for its amusing and humorous in- 
structiveness. Rhetoric and Style are among De Quincey's greatest 
performances; and, though in them too, considered as sketches 
of Literary History, the strength runs towards points and speciali- 
ties, the titles declare that beforehand and indicate what the 
specialities are. The Ccesars is, undoubtedly, his most ambitious 
attempt, all in all, in the historical department; and he set great 
store by it himself; but it cannot, I think, take rank among his 
highest productions. There are striking passages and suggestions 
in it; but the general effect is too hazy, many of the parts are hur- 
ried, and none of the characters of the Emperors stands out with 
convincing distinctness after that of Julius Caesar. 

Few authors are so difficult to represent by mere extracts as De 
Quincey, so seldom does he complete a matter within a short space. 
The following, however, may pass as specimens of him in the 
descriptive and historical department. The second is excellent 
and memorable : — 

First Sight of Dr. Parr 

Nobody announced him; and we were left to collect his name from his 
dress and his conversation. Hence it happened that for some time I was 
disposed to question with myself whether this might not be Mr. Bobus even 
(little as it could be supposed to resemble him), rather than Dr. Parr, so much 
did he contradict all my rational preconceptions. "A man," said I, "who 
has insulted people so outrageously ought not to have done this in single re- 
liance upon his professional protections : a brave man, and a man of honour, 
would here have carried about with him, in his manner and deportment, 
some such language as this, — ' Do not think that I shelter myself under my 
gown from the natural consequences of the affronts I offer: mortal combats 
I am forbidden, sir, as a Christian minister, to engage in; but, as I find it 
impossible to refrain from occasional license of tongue, I am very willing to 
fight a few rounds in a ring with any gentleman who fancies himself ill-used.' " 
Let me not be misunderstood; I do not contend that Dr. Parr should often, 
or regularly, have offered this species of satisfaction. But I do insist upon it, 
— that no man should have given the very highest sort of provocation so wan- 
tonly as Dr. Parr is recorded to have done, unless conscious that, in a last 
extremity, he was ready, like a brave man, to undertake a short turn-up, in a 
private room, with any person whatsoever whom he had insulted past endur- 
ance. A doctor who had so often tempted (which is a kind way of saving 
had merited) a cudgelling ought himself to have had some ability to cudgel. 
Dr. Johnson assuredly would have acted on that principle. Had volume 



20 DAVID MASSON 

the second of that same folio with which he floored Osburn happened to lie 
ready to the prostrate man's grasp, nobody can suppose that Johnson would 
have disputed Osburn's right to retaliate; in which case a regular succession 
of rounds would have been established. Considerations such as these, and 
Dr. Parr's undeniable reputation (granted even by his most admiring biog- 
raphers) as a sanguinary fiagellator through his long career of pedagogue, 
had prepared me, — nay, entitled me, — to expect in Dr. Parr a huge carcase 
of a man, fourteen stone at the least. Hence, then, my surprise, and the per- 
plexity I have recorded, when the door opened, and a little man, in a most 
plebeian wig, . . . cut his way through the company, and made for a fauteuil 
standing opposite the fire. Into this he lunged; and then forthwith, without 
preface or apology, began to open his talk upon the room. Here arose a new 
marvel, and a greater. If I had been scandalized at Dr. Parr's want of thews 
and bulk, conditions so indispensable for enacting the part of Sam Johnson, 
much more, and with better reason, was I now petrified with his voice, utter- 
ance, gestures, demeanour. Conceive, reader, by way of counterpoise to the 
fine classical pronunciation of Dr. Johnson, an infantine lisp, — the worst 
I ever heard, — from the lips of a man above sixty, and accompanied with all 
sorts of ridiculous grimaces and little stage gesticulations. As he sat in 
his chair, turning alternately to the right and to the left, that he might dis- 
tribute his edification in equal proportions amongst us, he seemed the very 
image of a little French gossiping abbe. Yet all that I have mentioned was, 
and seemed to be, a trifle by comparison with the infinite pettiness of his 
matter. Nothing did he utter but little shreds of calumnious tattle, the most 
ineffably silly and frivolous of all that was then circulating in the Whig salons 
of London against the Regent. . . . He began precisely in these words: 
" Oh ! I shall tell you " (laying a stress upon the word shall, which still further 
aided the resemblance to a Frenchman) "a sto-hee" (lispingly for story) 
"about the Pince Wegent" (such was his nearest approximation to Prince 
Regent). "Oh, the Pince Wegent! — the Pince Wegent! — what a sad 
Pince Wegent !" And so the old babbler went on, sometimes wringing his 
hands in lamentation, sometimes flourishing them with French grimaces and 
shrugs of shoulders, sometimes expanding and contracting his fingers like a 
fan. After an hour's twaddle of this scandalous description, suddenly he 
rose, and hopped out of the room, exclaiming all the way "Oh, what a Pince! 
— Oh, what a Wegent ! Is it a Wegent, is it a Pince, that you call this man ? 
Oh, what a sad Pince ! Did anybody ever hear of such a sad Pince ! — such a 
sad Wegent — such a sad, sad Pince Wegent? Oh, what a Pince!" &c, 
da capo. Not without indignation did I exclaim to myself, on this winding up 
of the scene, "And so this, then, this lithping slander-monger, and retailer of 
gossip fit rather for washerwomen over their tea than for scholars and states- 
men, is the champion whom his party would propound as the adequate antag- 
onist of Samuel Johnson ! Faugh!" . . . Such was my first interview with 
Dr. Parr; such its issue. And now let me explain my drift in thus detailing 
its circumstances. Some people will say the drift was doubtless to exhibit 
Dr. Parr in a disadvantageous light, — ■ as a p?tty gossiper and a man of mean 
personal appearance. No, by no means. Far from it. I, that write this 
paper, have myself a mean personal appearance; and I love men of mean 
appearance. . . . Dr. Parr, therefore, lost nothing in my esteem by showing 
a meanish exterior. Yet even this was worth mentioning, and had a value in 
reference to my present purpose. I like Dr. Parr; I may say even that I 



BE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 21 

love him, for some noble qualities of heart that really did belong to him, and 
were continually breaking out in the midst of his singular infirmities. But this, 
or a far nobler moral character than Dr. Parr's, can offer no excuse for giving 
a false elevation to his intellectual pretensions, and raising him to a level which 
he will be found incapable of keeping when the props of partial friendship 
are withdrawn. — Works, V. 36-43. 

Summary View of the History of Greek Literature 

There were two groups or clusters of Grecian wits, two deposits or stratifi- 
cations of the national genius; and these were about a century apart. What 
makes them specially rememberable is the fact that each of these brilliant 
clusters had gathered separately about that man as their central pivot who 
even apart from this relation to the literature, was otherwise the leading spirit 
of his age. . . . Who were they? The one was Pericles, the other was 
Alexander of Macedon. Except Themistocles, who may be ranked 
as senior to Pericles by one generation (or thirty-three years), in the whole 
deduction of Grecian annals no other public man, statesman, captain-general, 
administrator of the national resources, can be mentioned as approaching to 
these two men in splendour of reputation, or even in real merit. Pisistratus 
was too far back ; Alcibiades, who might (chronologically speaking) have been 
the son of Pericles, was too unsteady and (according to Mr. Coleridge's 
coinage) "unreliable," or perhaps, in more correct English, too "unrely- 
uponable." Thus far our purpose prospers. No man can pretend to forget 
two such centres as Pericles for the elder group, or Alexander of Macedon 
(the "strong he-goat" of Jewish prophecy) for the junior. Round these two 
foci, in two different but adjacent centuries, gathered the total starry heavens, 
the galaxy, the Pantheon of Grecian intellect . . . That we may still 
more severely search the relations in all points between the two systems, let 
us assign the chronological locus of each, because that will furnish another 
element towards the exact distribution of the chart representing the motion 
and the oscillations of human genius. Pericles had a very long adminis- 
tration. He was Prime Minister of Athens for upwards of one entire genera- 
tion. He died in the year 429 before Christ, and in a very early stage of that 
great Peloponnesian war which was the one sole intestine war for Greece, 
affecting every nook and angle in the land. Now, in this long public life of 
Pericles, we are at liberty to fix on any year as his chronological locus. On 
good reasons, not called for in this place, we fix on the year 444 before 
Christ. This is too remarkable to be forgotten. Four, four, four, what in 
some games of cards is called a " prial" (we presume, by an elision of the first 
vowel, for parial) forms an era which no man can forget. It was the fif- 
teenth year before the death of Pericles, and not far from the bisecting year 
of his political life. Now, passing to the other system, the locus of Alexander 
is quite as remarkable, as little liable to be forgotten when once indicated, 
and more easily determined, because selected from a narrower range of choice. 
The exact chronological locus of Alexander is t>32> y ears before Christ. Every- 
body knows how brief was the career of this great man : it terminated in the 
year 323 before Christ. But the annus mirabilis x of his public life, the most 
effective and productive year throughout his oriental anabasis, was the year 

1 [Year of marvels.] 



22 , DAVID MAS SON 

333 before Christ. Here we have another "prial," a prial of threes, for the 
locus of Alexander, if properly corrected. Thus far the elements are settled, 
the chronological longitude and latitude of the two great planetary systems 
into which the Greek literature breaks up and distributes itself : 444 and 333 
are the two central years for the two systems; allowing, therefore, an inter- 
space of in years between the foci of each. . . . Passing onwards from 
Pericles, you find that all the rest in his system were men in the highest 
sense creative, absolutely setting the very first example, each in his particular 
walk of composition; themselves without previous models, and yet destined 
every man of them to become models for all after-generations; themselves 
without fathers or mothers, and yet having all posterity for their children. 
First come the three men divini spiritus, 1 under a heavenly afflatus, ^schy- 
lus, Sophocles, Euripides, the creators of Tragedy out of a village mummery ; 
next comes Aristophanes, who breathed the breath of life into Comedy; 
then comes the great philosopher, Anaxagoras, who first theorized success- 
fully on man and the world. Next come, whether great or not, the still more 
famous philosophers, Socrates, Plato, Xenophon; then comes, leaning upon 
Pericles, as sometimes Pericles leaned upon him, the divine artist, Phidias; 
and behind this immortal man walk Herodotus and Thucydides. What a 
procession to Eleusis would these men have formed ! what a frieze, if some 
great artist could arrange it as dramatically as Chaucer has arranged the 
Pilgrimage to Canterbury ! . . . Now, let us step on a hundred years for- 
ward. We are now within hail of Alexander, and a brilliant consistory of 
Grecian men that is by which he is surrounded. There are now exquisite 
masters of the more refined comedy ; there are, again, great philosophers, for 
all the great schools are represented by able successors ; and, above all others, 
there is the one philosopher who played with men's minds (according to 
Lord Bacon's comparison) as freely as ever his princely pupil with their 
persons, — there is Ar stotle. There are great orators; and, above all 
others, there is that orator whom succeeding generations (wisely or not) have 
adopted as the representative name for what is conceivable as oratorical per- 
fection, — there is Demosthenes. Aristotle and Demosthenes are in them- 
selves bulwarks of power; many hosts lie in those two names. For artists, 
again, to range against Phidias, there is Lysippus the sculptor, and there is 
Apelles the painter; for great captains and masters of strategic art, there is 
Alexander himself, with a glittering cortege of general officers, well qualified 
to wear the crowns which they will win, and to head the dynasties which they 
will found. Historians there are now, as in that former age; and, upon the 
whole, it cannot be denied that the "turnout" is showy and imposing. . . . 
Before comparing the second "deposit" (geologically speaking) of Grecian 
genius with the first, let us consider what it was (if anything) that connected 
them. Here, reader, we would wish to put a question. Saving your pres- 
ence, Did you ever see what is called a dumb-bell? We have; and know it 
by more painful evidence than that of sight. You, therefore, O reader! 
if personally cognizant of dumb-bells, we will remind, if not, we will inform, 
that it is a cylindrical bar of iron or lead, issuing at each end in a globe of 
the same metal, and usually it is sheathed in green baize. . . . Now, 
reader, it is under this image of the dumb-bell that we couch our allegory. 
Those globes at each end are the two systems or separate clusters of Greek 

i * [Qf godlike mind. ] 



DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 23 

literature; and that cylinder which connects them is the long man that ran 
into each system, binding the two together. Who was that ? It was Isocrates. 
Great we cannot call him in conscience; and therefore, by way of compromise, 
we call him long, which, in one sense, he certainly was; for he lived through 
four-and-twenty Olympiads, each containing four solar years. He narrowly 
escaped being a hundred years old; and, though that did not carry him from 
centre to centre, yet, as each system might be supposed to protend a radius 
each way of twenty years, he had, in fact, a full personal cognizance (and 
pretty equally) of the two systems, remote as they were, which composed 
the total world of Grecian genius. . . . Now then, reader, you have ar- 
rived at that station from which you overlook the whole of Greek literature, 
as a few explanations will soon convince you. Where is Homer? where is 
Hesiod? you ask; where is Pindar? Homer and Hesiod lived 1000 years 
B.C., or, by the lowest computation, near 900. For anything that we know, 
they may have lived with Tubal Cain. At all events, they belong to no power 
or agency that set in motion the age of Pericles, or that operated on that age. 
Pindar, again, was a solitary emanation of some unknown influences, at 
Thebes, more than five hundred years before Christ. He may be referred 
to the same age as Pythagoras. These are all that can be cited before Pericles. 
Next, for the ages after Alexander, it is certain that Greece Proper was so 
much broken in spirit by the loss of her autonomy, dating from that era, as 
never again to have rallied sufficiently to produce a single man of genius, — 
not one solitary writer who acted as a power upon the national mind. Calli- 
machus was nobody, and not decidedly Grecian. Theocritus, a man of real 
genius in a limited way, is a Grecian in that sense only according to which an 
Anglo-American is an Englishman. Besides that, one swallow does not make 
a summer. Of any other writers, above all others of Menander, apparently 
a man of divine genius, we possess only a few wrecks ; and of Anacreon, who 
must have been a poet of original power, we do not certainly know that we 
have even any wrecks. Of those which pass under his name not merely the 
authorship, but the era, is very questionable indeed. Plutarch and Lucian, 
the unlearned reader must understand, both belong to post-Christian ages. 
And, for all the Greek emigrants who may have written histories, such as we 
now value for their matter more than for their execution, one and all, they 
belong too much to Roman civilization that we should ever think of connecting 
them with native Greek literature Polybius in the days of the second Scipio, 
Dion Cassius and Appian in the acme of Roman civility, are no more Gre- 
cian authors because they wrote in Greek than the Emperors Marcus Antoninus 
and Julian were other than Romans because, from monstrous coxcombry, 
they chose to write in Greek their barren memoranda. — Works, X. 242-255. 

It would be hopeless to seek to represent by extracts, even in this 
inadequate fashion, that very characteristic portion of De Quincey's 
writings of the generally historical kind which we have called his 
Historical Speculations and Researches. They must be read in 
their integrity. The Casuistry of Roman Meals, Cicero, Judas 
Iscariot, The Essenes, and The Pagan Oracles, may be especially 
recommended. They are admirable specimens of his boldness 
and acuteness in questioning received historical beliefs, and of his 



24 DAVID MASSON 

ingenuity in working out novelties or paradoxes. The drift of 
The Casuistry of Roman Meals is that the Romans, and indeed 
the ancients generally, had no such regular meal early in the day 
as our modern breakfast, and that a whole coil of important social 
consequences depended on that one fact. In his Cicero he pro- 
pounds a view of his own as to the character of the famous Roman 
orator and wit and his function in the struggle between Caesar and 
Pompey. The paradox in Judas Iscariot is that Judas was not the 
vulgar traitor of the popular conception, but a headstrong fanatic, 
who, having missed the true spiritual purport of Christ's mission, 
and attached himself to Christ in the expectation of a political 
revolution to be effected by Christ's assumption of a temporal 
kingship or championship of the Jewish race, had determined 
to precipitate matters by leaving Christ no room for hesitation or 
delay. In The Essenes the attempt is to show that there was no 
real or independent sect of that name among the Jews, all the con- 
fusion to the contrary having originated in a rascally invention 
of the historian Josephus. In The Pagan Oracles there is a contra- 
diction of the tradition of a sudden paralysis of the Pagan ritual 
on the first appearance of Christianity, and a castigation of the 
early Christian writers for having invented the pious lie. 

II. SPECULATIVE, DIDACTIC, AND CRITICAL 

While a speculative and critical element is discernible in almost 
all the papers now dismissed as in the main biographical or his- 
torical, and while some of the historical papers were regarded by 
De Quincey himself as typical examples of the speculative essay, 
it is of a different set of his papers that our classification obliges 
us to take account under the present heading. They also fall into 
subdivisions : — 

I. Metaphysical, Psychological, and Ethical: — In this subdivi- 
sion, itself composite, but answering to what passes under the name of Phi- 
losophy in a general sense, may be included the following : — System of the 
Heavens as revealed by Lord Rosse's Telescopes ; various papers or portions 
of papers relating to Kant, e.g. part of the Letters to a Young Man whose 
Education has been neglected, the paper entitled Kant in his Miscellaneous 
Essays, and the translation of Kant's Idea of a Universal History on a Cos- 
mopolitical Plan; the scraps entitled Dreaming and The Palimpsest of the 
Human Brain, in the " Sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater " 
(Vol. XVI.); some of the scraps in the "Notes from the Pocket-Book of a 
Late Opium-Eater," e.g. On Suicide; and the articles entitled Plato's 



DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 25 

Republic, Glance at the Works of Mackintosh, Casuistry, On War, National 
Temperance Movements, Presence of Mind, and The Juggernaut of Social Life. 

II. Theological : — Protestantism, Miracles as Subjects of Testimony, 
On Christianity as an Organ of Political Movement, and Memorial Chro- 
nology on a new and more apprehensible system. This last, included in Vol 
XVI., is an unfinished paper, posthumously published from the author's 
manuscript; and it contains little more than a clever and humorous intro- 
duction, in the form of an address to a young lady, with the beginning of what 
was intended to be a piece of Biblical Criticism. 

III. English Politics: — A Tory's Account of Toryism, Whiggism, 
and Radicalism; On the Political Parties of Modern England; Falsifica- 
tion of English History. 

IV. Political Economy: — Logic of Political Economy; Dialogues of 
Three Templars on Political Economy; the scraps entitled Malthus and 
Measure of Value in the "Notes from the Pocket-Book of a Late Opium- 
Eater"; and the article entitled California. 

V. Literary Theory and Criticism : — The large essays entitled 
Rhetoric and Style may be here noted again; and there may be associated 
with them, as expositions of general literary theory, the Letters to a Young 
Man whose Education has been neglected, and the article entitled Language 
(which, despite the title, is really on Style). The more special articles of the 
same sort form a numerous series. Arranged in the chronological order of 
their subjects, they are as follows: — Theory of Greek Tragedy, The Antigone 
of Sophocles, and The Theban Sphinx; On the Knocking at the Gate in Mac- 
beth; the short critical paper entitled Milton (in Vol. VI.), and the other en- 
titled Milton versus Southey and Landor (in Vol. XL); the review entitled 
Schlosser's Literary History of the Eighteenth Century; the two critical ar- 
ticles on Pope, entitled Alexander Pope (in Vol. VIII.) and Lord Carlisle on 
Pope (in Vol. XII.); the article Oliver Goldsmith (slightly biographical, but 
chiefly critical) ; the paper on Carlyle's Translation of Wilhelm Meister, re- 
printed under the title Goethe Reflected in his Novel of Wilhelm Meister, with 
omission of the remarks on the translator (in Vol. XII.); the sketch John 
Paul Frederick Richter, prefixed to the translated "Analects from Richter" 
(in Vol. XIII.) ; the essay On Wordsworth's Poetry; the Notes on Godwin 
and Foster, the slight little paper entitled John Keats, and the Notes on 
Walter Savage Landor. To these may be added Orthographic Mutineers, 
The Art of Conversation, the scrap Walladmor, and one or two of the scraps 
called "Notes from the Pocket-Book of a Late Opium-Eater." 

To the harder varieties of speculative Philosophy, it will be 
observed, De Quincey has contributed less of an original kind than 
might have been expected from his known private passion for meta- 
physical studies. If we except his System of the Heavens, which 
hints metaphysical ideas in the form of a splendid cosmological 
vision, and his Palimpsest of the Human Brain, which is full of 
psychological suggestion, he seems to have satisfied himself in this 
department by reports from Kant and recommendations of Kant to 
English attention. The accuracy of some of his statements about 
Kant, and indeed of his knowledge of Kant, has been called in 



26 DAVID MASSON 

question of late; but it remains to his credit that, in a singularly 
bleak and vapid period of the native British philosophizing, he had 
contracted such an admiration, all in all, for the great German 
transcendentalist. His translation of Kant's Idea of a Universal 
History was a feat in itself. That essay remains to this day the 
clearest argument for the possibility of a Science of History since 
Vico propounded the Scienza Nuova; and to have perceived the 
importance of such an essay in the year 1824 was to be in possession 
of a philosophical notion of great value long before it was popular 
in Britain. That De Quincey contented himself so much with mere 
accounts of Kant personally, and literary glimpses of the nature of 
his speculations, may have been due to the fact that original phi- 
losophizing of the metaphysical and psychological kinds was not 
wanted in magazines and would not pay. He made amends, how- 
ever, as our list will have shown, by a considerable quantity of 
writing on subjects of Speculative Ethics. His best essay of this 
kind is that entitled Casuistry. It was a favourite idea of De Quin- 
cey's that Moral Philosophy in recent times, especially in Protes- 
tant countries, has run too much upon generalities, avoiding too 
much those very cases of constant recurrence in life about which 
difficulties are likely to arise in practical conduct. Accordingly, 
in this essay, there is a discussion of duelling and the laws of 
honour, the legitimacy of suicide, proper behaviour to servants, the 
limits of the rule of veracity, &c, &c, all with lively historical illus- 
trations. In the paper On War the necessary permanence of that 
agency in the world is asserted strongly, and a certain character of 
nobleness and beneficence claimed for it. There is less of dissent 
from current philanthropy in the article on Temperance Move- 
ments; but it will not give*entire satisfaction. The article on 
Plato's Republic is a virulent attack upon a philosopher towards 
whom we should have expected to see De Quincey standing in an 
attitude of discipleship and veneration. This is owing chiefly 
to De Quincey's disgust with the moral heresies, in the matter of 
marriage and the like, on which Plato so coolly professes to found 
his imaginary commonwealth ; and it is possible that, had he been 
treating Plato in respect of the sum-total of his philosophic and 
literary merits, we should have had a much more admiring estimate. 
As it is, one has to pity De Quincey rather than Plato in this unfor- 
tunate interview. He looks as petulant and small in his attack 
on Plato as he did in his attack on Goethe. 

The expressly theological papers of De Quincey, with passages 



DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 27 

innumerable through his other writings, show that he took his 
stand on established Christian orthodoxy. He avowed his belief 
in a miraculous revelation from God to mankind, begun and 
continued in the history of the Jewish race, and consummated 
in the life of Christ and in the diffusion of Christianity by the 
Apostles. As a reasoned piece of Christian apologetics his answer 
to Hume's argument, entitled Miracles as Subjects of Testimony, 
does not seem to have won much regard from theologians, and, 
though very subtle, is certainly deficient in the homely quality 
which Hobbes called bite. His own religious faith, indeed, appears 
to have been very much of the nature of an inherited sentiment, 
independent of reasoning, and which he would not let reasoning 
disturb. In one respect, too, his theology was of what many 
theologians now would call a narrow and old-fashioned kind. 
There is no trace in him of that notion of a universal religious 
inspiration among the nations, and so of a certain respectability, 
greater or less, in all mythologies, which has been fostered by 
the modern science of religions. On the contrary, Christianity 
is with him the single divine revelation in the world, and he thinks 
and speaks of the Pagan religions, in the style of the old-fashioned 
theology, as simply false religions, horrid religions, inventions 
of the spirit of evil. How this is to be reconciled with his wide 
range of historical sympathy, and especially with his admiration 
of the achievements of the Greek intellect and the grandeur of 
the Roman character, it might be difficult to say. Probably it 
was because he distinguished between those noble and admirable 
developments which human nature could work out for itself, 
and which therefore belong to humanity as such, and the more 
rare and spiritual possibilities which he believed actual revelation 
had woven into the web of humanity, and which were to be re- 
garded as gifts from the supernatural. At all events, the matter 
stands as has been stated. In the same way, Mahometanism 
figures in his regard as of little worth, monotheistic certainly and 
therefore superior to the Pagan creeds, but a spurious religion and 
partly stolen. Further, De Quincey's Christianity declares itself 
as deliberately of the Protestant species. With much respect 
for Roman Catholicism, he yet repudiates it as in great measure 
a corruption of the original system, which original system he finds 
reproduced in the Protestantism of the sixteenth century. His 
article entitled Protestantism is an exposition of his views in that 
matter, and is altogether a very able and important paper. If 



28 DAVID MASSON 

he has seemed narrow hitherto in his philosophy of religion, here, 
once within the bounds of his Protestantism, and engaged in 
defining Protestantism, he becomes broad enough. "The self- 
sufficingness of the Bible and the right of private judgment " are, 
he maintains, "the two great characters in which Protestantism 
commences," and the doctrines by which it distinguishes itself 
from the Church of Rome. Bound up in these doctrines, he 
maintains, is the duty of absolute religious toleration; and by 
this principle of absolute religious toleration, the right of the 
individual to think, print, and publish what he pleases, he abides 
with exemplary fidelity through all his writings, even while in 
skirmish with the free-thinkers for whom he has the strongest 
personal disgust. But this is not all. He abjures Bibliolatry, or 
that kind of respect for the letter of the Bible which is founded 
on the notion of verbal inspiration, denying it to be a necessary 
tenet of Protestantism, or to be possible indeed for any scholarly 
understanding. It is not only, he maintains, that the notion of 
literal or verbal inspiration is broken down at once by recollection 
of the corruptions of the original text of the Scriptures, their 
various readings, and the fact that it is only in translations that 
the Scriptures exist for the masses of mankind in all countries. 
He addresses himself more emphatically to the alleged palpable 
errors in the substance and teachings of the Bible, its violations 
of history and chronology, its inconsistencies with modern science. 
Here he refuses at once that method of reconciling science with 
Scripture which proceeds by torture of texts into meanings differ- 
ent from those which they bore to the Hebrews or the Greeks who 
first read them. His bold principle is that Science and the Bible 
cannot be reconciled in such matters, and that the desire to recon- 
cile them indicates a most gross and carnal misconception of the 
very idea of a divine revelation. The principle may be given in 
his own words : — 

It is an obligation resting upon the Bible, if it is to be consistent with itself, 
that it should refuse to teach science; and, if the Bible ever had taught any 
one art, science, or process of life, it would have been asked, Is a divine mission 
abandoned suddenly for a human mission? By what caprice is this one 
science taught, and others not ? Or these two, suppose, and not all ? But 
an objection even deadlier would have followed. It is clear as is the purpose 
of daylight that the whole body of the arts and sciences comprises one vast 
machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect. For 
this end they exist. To see God, therefore, descending into the arena of 
science, and contending, as it were, for his own prizes, by teaching science 



DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 29 

in the Bible, would be to see him intercepting from their self-evident destina- 
tion (viz., man's intellectual benefit) his own problems by solving them him- 
self. No spectacle could more dishonour the divine idea, could more injure 
man under the mask of aiding him. The Bible must not teach anything that 
man can teach himself. 

The revelation of the Old and New Testaments is to be regarded, 
then, according to De Quincey, as a leaven of truths purely moral 
and spiritual, sent into the world by miracle precisely because 
man could never have found them out for himself, with a careful 
abstinence from any mixture of matter of ordinary knowledge 
in advance of what was already existent, and therefore with an 
adoption of all existing historical and scientific phrases and tradi- 
tions. Hence Bibliolatry, in the sense of a belief in the immacu- 
late correctness of the language and statements of the Bible on 
all subjects whatsoever, was no tenet of genuine Christianity, 
secure as every Christian ought to be that, whatever changes of 
conception on such subjects as the antiquity of the human race, 
or the system of the physical universe, might come with the progress 
of the human intelligence, the supernatural leaven would impreg- 
nate them as they came, and go on working. In this doctrine, 
of which De Quincey seems to have meditated a particular appli- 
cation in his unfinished papers entitled "Memorial Chronology" 
he was substantially at one with Coleridge and Wordsworth. He 
was at one with them, too, in his affection for Church-Establish- 
ments. In remarkable difference from his favourite Milton, 
who regarded the incorporation of Church and State as the cause 
of the vitiation of the supernatural leaven in the world, and scowled 
back with hatred on the Emperor Constantine as the beginner 
of that mischief, De Quincey confessed to a special kindness for 
Constantine, precisely because that Emperor had conceived the 
idea of converting Christianity into a political agency. It was 
Constantine who had carried Christian teaching into effect in 
such institutions as hospitals and public provision for the poor; 
and the prospects of the world for the future were bound up with 
the possible extensions of the political influence of Christianity in 
similar directions. That is the subject of the essay entitled On 
Christianity as an Organ of Political Movement. In short, De 
Quincey is to be remembered, in his religious relations, as a 
staunch Church-of-England man of the broad school, not given 
to High-Church sacerdotalism, though with an aesthetic liking in 
his own case for a comely ritual. 



30 DAVID MASSON 

In politics De Quincey was an English Tory. In the two papers 
entitled A Tory's Account of Toryism, Whiggism, and Radicalism, 
and On the Political Parties of Modern England, he avows his 
partisanship. Toryism asserts itself also in the article on Dr. 
Parr, and tinges some of the other papers. It is interesting, 
indeed, to observe how much of the "John Bull element," as 
Mr. Page calls it, there was, all in all, in the feeble little man. 
His patriotism was of the old type of the days of Pitt and Nelson. 
He exulted in the historic glories of England and her imperial 
ascendency in so many parts of the globe, and would have had 
her do battle for any punctilio of honour, as readily as for any 
more visible interest, in her dealings with foreigners. He had 
a good deal of the old English anti-Gallican prejudice; and, 
though he has done justice, over and over again, to some of the 
finer characteristics of the French, the total effect of his remarks 
on the French, politically and intellectually, is irritating to the 
admirers of that great nation. He knew them only through books 
or by casual observation of stray Frenchmen he met; for he was 
never out of the British Islands, and never experienced that sudden 
awakening of a positive affection for the French which comes 
infallibly from even a single visit to their lightsome capital. On 
the other hand, though Scotland was his home for so large a part 
of his life, he seems never to have contracted the least sympathy 
with anything distinctively Scottish. Even his Toryism was 
specially English or South-British. But, like all other parts of 
his creed, his Toryism was of a highly intellectual kind, with 
features of its own. In such questions, for example, as that of 
the continuance of flogging and other brutal forms of punishment 
in the army and navy and elsewhere, he parted company with 
the ordinary mass of Tories, leaving his curse with them in that 
particular, and went with the current of Radical sentiment and 
opinion. How far he was carried, by his candour of intellect and 
depth and accuracy of scholarship, from the ordinary rut of party 
commonplace, may be judged also from his little paper entitled 
Falsification of English History. It is a gallant little paper, and 
one of the best rebukes in our language to that systematic vilifica- 
tion of the Puritan Revolution, the English Commonwealth, and 
the Reign of Cromwell, which has come down in the Anglican 
mind as an inheritance from the Restoration, and still vulgarizes 
so much of our scholarship and our literature. 

The Dialogues of the Three Templars and the Logic of Political 



DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 3 1 

Economy are De Quincey's chief contributions to the literature 
of Economic Science. As to the literary deftness of the essay 
and the treatise there is no doubt. For cutting lucidity of exposi- 
tion and beauty of style they are to be envied by most writers on 
Political Economy. This seems to have been felt by Mr. John 
Stuart Mill, who mentions De Quincey with respect, and uses 
quotations from him thankfully, in parts of his standard work. 
The question rather is whether De Quincey has any title, such as 
he himself seemed to claim, to the character of an original thinker 
in the matter of the science. Mr. Mill's language in one place 
appears to negative this claim, though very gently; and the ques- 
tion has been reopened, in De Quincey's interest, by Mr. Shad- 
worth Hodgson in an essay entitled "De Quincey as Political 
Economist." Enough here on that matter. 

If De Quincey surpasses himself anywhere in his didactic 
papers, it is in those that concern Literary Theory and Criticism. 
No English writer has left a finer body of disquisition on the science 
and principles of Literature than will be found in De Quincey's 
general papers entitled Rhetoric, Style, and Language, and his 
Letters to a Young Man, together with his more particular articles 
entitled Theory of Greek Tragedy, The Antigone of Sophocles, 
Milton, Milton versus Southey and Landor, Alexander Pope, Lord 
Carlisle on Pope, Schlosser's Literary History of the Eighteenth 
Century, and On Wordsworth's Poetry. There, or elsewhere, in 
De Quincey, will be found the last word, so far as there can be a 
last word, on some of the most important questions of style or 
literary art, and a treatment of literary questions throwing back 
into mere obsolete ineptitude the literary theories of such masters 
of the eighteenth century as Addison and Johnson, and of such of 
their successors as the acute Jeffrey and the robust but coarse- 
grained Whately. Goethe, the greatest literary critic that ever 
lived, was more comprehensive and universally tolerant; but 
De Quincey was facile princeps, 1 to the extent of his touch, among 
the English critics of his generation. He acknowledged that he 
had received some of his leading ideas in literary art from Words- 
worth originally; but whatever he derived from Wordsworth 
was matured by so much independent reflection, and so modified 
by the peculiarities of his own temperament, that the result was 
a system of precepts differing from Wordsworth's in not a few 
points. 

1 [Easily the chief.] 



32 DAVID MASSON 

One of the best known of De Quincey's critical maxims is his 
distinction, after Wordsworth, between the Literature of Know- 
ledge, which he would call Literature only by courtesy, and the 
Literature of Power, which alone he regarded as Literature proper. 
My belief is that the distinction has been overworked in the form 
in which De Quincey put it forth, and that it would require a 
great deal of reexplication and modification to bring it into defen- 
sible and permanent shape. As it would be unpardonable, how- 
ever, to omit this De Quinceyism in a sketch of De Quincey's 
opinions, here is one of the passages in which he expounds it : -*- 

The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power 

In that great social organ which, collectively, we call Literature, there may 
be distinguished two separate offices that may blend and often do so, but 
capable, severally, of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal re- 
pulsion. There is, first, the literature of knowledge, and, secondly, the litera- 
ture of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the sec- 
ond is to move: the first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The first 
speaks to the -mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, 
it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through 
affections of pleasure and sympathy. Remotely, it may travel towards an 
object seated in what Lord Bacon calls dry light; but, proximately, it does 
and must operate, else it ceases to be a literature of power, in and through 
that humid light which clothes itself in the mists and glittering iris of human 
passions, desires, and genial emotions. Men have so little reflected on 
the higher functions of literature as to find it a paradox if one should describe 
it as a mean or subordinate purpose of books to give information. But this 
is a paradox only in the sense which makes it honourable to be paradoxical. 
Whenever we talk in ordinary language of seeking information or gaining 
knowledge, we understand the words as connected with something of absolute 
novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place 
in human interests that it is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds : it 
exists eternally by way of germ or latent principle in the lowest as in the high- 
est, needing to be developed, but never to be planted. To be capable of 
transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth that ranges on a lower 
scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth, — namely, power, 
or deep sympathy with truth. . . . Were it not that human sensibilities are 
ventilated and continually called out into exercise by the great phenomena of 
infancy, or of real life as it moves through chance and change, or of literature 
as it recombines these elements in the mimicries of poetry, romance, &c, 
it is certain that, like any animal power or muscular energy falling into dis- 
use, all such sensibilities would gradually drop and dwindle. It is in relation 
to these great moral capacities of man that the literature of power, as contra- 
distinguished from that of knowledge, lives and has its field of action. It is 
concerned with what is highest in man; for the Scriptures themselves never 
condescended to deal, by suggestion or cooperation, with the mere discursive 
understanding: when speaking of man in his intellectual capacity, the Scrip- 



DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 33 

tures speak not of the understanding, but of "the understanding heart," — 
making the heart, i.e. the great intuitive (or non-discursive) organ, to be the 
interchangeable formula for man in his highest state of capacity for the in- 
finite. Tragedy, romance, fairy tale, or epopee, all alike restore to man's 
mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of mercy, of retribution, which 
else (left to the support of daily life in its realities) would languish for want of 
sufficient illustration. . . . Hence the preeminency over all authors that 
merely teach of the meanest that moves, or that teaches, if at all, indirectly by 
moving. The very highest work that has ever existed in the literature of 
knowledge is but a provisional work, a book upon trial and sufferance, and 
quamdiu bene se gesserit. 1 Let its teaching be even partially revised, let it be 
but expanded, nay, let its teaching be but placed in a better order, and in- 
stantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the literature of 
power, surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable amongst men. 
For instance, the Principia of Sir Isaac Newton was a book militant on earth 
from the first. In all stages of its progress it would have to fight for its 
existence, — first, as regards absolute truth ; secondly, when that combat was 
over, as regards its form or mode of presenting the truth. And, as soon as a 
La Place, or anybody else, builds higher upon the foundations laid by this 
book, effectually he throws it out of the sunshine into decay and darkness; 
by weapons even from this book he superannuates and destroys this book, 
so that soon the name of Newton remains as a mere nominis umbra, 2 but his 
book, as a living power, has transmigrated into other forms. Now, on the 
contrary, the Iliad, the Prometheus of ^Eschylus, the Othello or King Lear, 
the Hamlet or Macbeth, or the Paradise Lost, are not militant, but triumphant 
forever, as long as the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught 
to speak. They never can transmigrate into new incarnations. To repro- 
duce them in new forms or variations, even if in some things they should be 
improved, would be to plagiarize. A good steam-engine is properly super- 
seded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by an- 
other, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo. — Works, 
viii. 5-9. 

III. IMAGINATIVE WRITINGS AND PROSE POETRY 

In this class may be reckoned the following : — 

I. Humorous Extravaganzas : — The paragon in this kind is, of course , 
Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts. There are, however, occasional 
passages of frolicsome invention through the other papers; and the entire 
paper Sortilege and Astrology may be taken as a jeu d'esprit of the same sort. 

II. Incidents of Real Life and Passages of History treated imagi- 
natively : — In addition to the poetic versions of incidents from real life 
that are interwrought with the expressly autobiographic writings, there 
ought to be mentioned specially the paper entitled Early Memorials of Gras- 
mere. It is the story of the loss of two peasants, a husband and his wife, 
among the hills, during a snowstorm in the Lake District, in the year 1807. 
In the same group, on grounds of literary principle, may be reckoned the 

1 [During good behaviour, — as long as it shall conduct itself well.] 

2 [The shadow of a name.] 

D 



34 DAVID MASSON 

story called The Spanish Military Nun and the paper entitled Joan of Arc. 
As has been already hinted, The Revolt of the Tartars might rank in the same 
high company. 

III. Novelettes and Romances : — Chief among these is De Quin- 
cey's one-volume novel or romance, Klosterheim, published in 1832, and un- 
fortunately not included in the edition of his collected works, nor accessible 
at present in any form, to any of her Majesty's subjects, except by importation 
of an American reprint. In connection with this independent attempt in 
prose-fiction, we may remember the short story or novelette called The 
Avenger (reprinted in Vol. XVI. from Blackwood's Magazine of 1838) and 
Walladmor, the pseudo-Waverley Novel of 1824, which De Quincey trans- 
lated from the German. There are, besides, some novelettes from the Ger- 
man, reprinted in the collective edition. 

IV. Prose Phantasies and Lyrics : — ■ Although De Quincey ranked 
the whole of his Confessions as properly an example of that "mode of im- 
passioned prose" in which he thought there had been few or no precedents in 
English, it is enough here to remember those parts of the Confessions which 
may be distinguished as "dream phantasies." To be added, under our pres- 
ent heading (besides passages in the Autobiographic Sketches), are The 
Daughter of Lebanon, the extraordinary paper in three parts called The 
English Mail Coach, and the little cluster of fragments called Suspiria de 
Profundis (i.e. "Sighs from the Depths"), being a Sequel to the Confessions 
of an English Opium-Eater. In fact, however, only three of the six fragments 
there gathered under the common name of "Suspiria" are either "lyrics" or 
"phantasies," the rest being critical or psychological. The three entitled 
to a place here are those entitled Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow, Savannah- 
la-Mar, and Memorial Suspiria. 

The celebrity of the essay On Murder considered as one of the 
Fine Arts is not surprising. The ghastly originality of the con- 
ception, the humorous irony with which it is sustained by stroke 
after stroke, and the mad frenzy of the closing scene, where the 
assembled club of amateurs in murder, with Toad-in-the-hole 
leading them, drink their toasts, and sing their chorus in honour 
of certain superlative specimens of their favourite art, leave an 
impression altogether exceptional, as of pleasure mixed illegiti- 
mately with the forbidden and horrible. For a lighter and more 
genial specimen of De Quincey in his whimsical vein, Sortilege 
and Astrology may be cordially recommended. To pass from 
such papers to Early Memorials of Grasmere, The Spanish Mili- 
tary Nun, and Joan of Arc, gives one a fresh idea of the versa- 
tility of his powers. The first, describing winter among the English 
Lakes, and telling the tragic story of George and Sarah Green, 
and of the bravery of their little girl left in charge of the cottage 
to which they were never to return alive, has all the mournful 
beauty of a commemorative prose-poem. The second, which 



DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 35 

is a narrative, from historical materials, of the adventures of a 
daring Spanish girl, in man's disguise, first in Spain and then in 
the Spanish parts of the new world, in the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century, is in De Quincey's most characteristic style of 
mingled humour and earnestness, and has all the fascination of 
one of the best of the Spanish picaresque romances. The paper 
on Joan of Arc, though brief, is nobly perfect. "What is to be 
thought of her? What is to be thought of the poor shepherd 
girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that, like the Hebrew 
shepherd boy from the hills and forests of Judea, rose suddenly 
out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration, 
rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies, 
and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings?" 
Opening in this strain of poetic solemnity, the paper maintains 
the same high tone throughout ; and, if it does not leave the ques- 
tion answered by enshrining the image of the Maid of Orleans 
in a sufficient vision of glory, there is no such answer in the English 
language. 

De Quincey included in his collected works two short tales of 
clever humour, called The Incognito, or Count Fitzhum, and The 
King of Hayti, and a third, called The Dice, a short story of 
devilry and black art, describing the first as " translated from 
the German of Dr. Schultze," and the other two merely as "from 
the German." Passing these and a fourth tale, called The Fatal 
Marksman, which is somewhat in the style of the third, and seems 
also to be from the German (though that is not stated) , we have, 
as the single original novelette of De Quincey among the collected 
works, the strange piece called The Avenger. It is a story, wholly 
fantastic and sensational, but quite in De Quincey's vein, of a 
series of appalling and mysterious murders supposed to happen 
in a German town in the year 181 6, and of the astounding 
discovery at last that they have all been the work of a certain 
magnificent youth, Maximilian Wyndham, of mixed English and 
Jewish descent, and of immense wealth, who had come to reside 
in the town, in the house of one of the University professors, with 
high- Russian credentials and universal acceptance among the 
citizens. He had come thither nominally to complete his studies 
but really in pursuit of a secret scheme of vengeance upon those 
of the inhabitants who had been concerned in certain deadly in- 
juries and dishonours done to his family, and especially to his 
Jewish mother. The story does not appear to have been much 



36 DAVID MASSON 

read; and admirers of De Quincey may judge from this descrip- 
tion of it whether it is worth looking up. It may be even more 
necessary to give some account of Klosterheim, or the Masque. 

As originally published by Blackwood in 1832, it was a small 
prettily-printed volume of 305 pages, without De Quincey's name 
after the title, but only the words "By the English Opium-Eater." 
It would make about half a volume in the collective edition of the 
works, were it included there. 

The scene of the story is an imaginary German city, Kloster- 
heim, with its forest-neighbourhood; and the time is the winter 
of 1633, with part of the year 1634, or just at that point of the 
great Thirty Years' War when, after the death of Gustavus- 
Adolphus, his Swedish generals are maintaining the war against 
the Imperialists, and all Germany is in confusion and misery with 
the marchings and counter-marchings, the ravagings and counter- 
ravagings, of the opposed armies. The Klosterheimers, as good 
Catholics, are mainly in sympathy with the Imperialists, but are 
in the peculiar predicament of being subject to a gloomy and 
tyrannical Landgrave, who, though a bigoted Roman Catholic, 
has reasons of his own for cultivating the Swedish alliance, and 
is in fact in correspondence with the Swedes. A leading spirit 
among them, and especially among the University students, is a 
certain splendid soldier-youth, Maximilian, a stranger from a 
distance. So, when the Klosterheimers are in excitement over 
the approach to their city, through the forest, of a travelling mass 
of pilgrims, under Imperialist convoy, all the way from Vienna, 
and over the chances that the poor pilgrims may be attacked and 
cut to pieces by a certain brutal Holkerstein, the head of a host 
of marauders who prowl through the forest, who but this Maximil- 
ian is the man to execute the general desire of Klosterheim by 
evading the orders of the cruel Landgrave and carrying armed 
aid to the pilgrims ? Well that he has done so ; for in the midst of 
the pilgrim-cavalcade, and the chief personage in it, is his own 
lady-love, the noble Paulina, a relative of the Emperor, and 
intrusted by him with despatches. The lovers meet; and, save 
for a night-alarm, in the course of which the portmanteau of 
secret despatches is abstracted by robbers from Lady Paulina's 
carriage, there is no accident till the pilgrims are close to Kloster- 
heim. There, in the night-time, Holkerstein and his host of 
marauders do fall upon them. There is a dreadful night-battle; 
and, though the marauding host is beaten off, chiefly by the heroic 



DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 37 

valour of Maximilian, it is but a wreck of the pilgrim-army that 
enters Klosterheim on the morrow, — and then alas ! without 
Maximilian among them. He has been carried away by the 
marauders, a wounded prisoner. The residue of the poor pil- 
grims are dispersed through the city somehow for hospitality, 
and the doleful Lady Paulina takes up her abode in the great 
abbey, close to the Landgrave's palace. Then, for a while, we 
are among the Klosterheimers, and called upon to pity them. 
For the gloomy Landgrave, always a tyrant, now revels in acts 
of tyranny and cruelty utterly indiscriminate and capricious, 
maddened by the goad of some new motive, which is not explained, 
but which we connect with intelligence he has obtained from the 
abstracted imperial despatches. There are arrests of students 
and citizens; all are in consternation; no one knows what will 
happen next. Suddenly, however, a counter-agency is at work 
in Klosterheim, baffling and bewildering the Landgrave and his 
wily Italian minister Adorni. This is a certain mysterious being, 
whether human or supernatural no one can tell, who calls himself 
"The Masque," and seems omnipresent and resistless. He 
appears when and where he likes, passes through bolts and bars, 
leaves messages to the Landgrave nailed up in public places, and 
defies his police. Houses are entered; citizens disappear, some- 
times with signs of scuffle and bloodshed left in their rooms ; and, 
as these victims of "The Masque" are not exclusively from the 
ranks of the Landgrave's partisans, it becomes doubtful whether 
the mysterious being has any political purpose, or is a mere demon 
of general malignity. But, evidently, the Landgrave is his main 
mark; and it is in the palace of the Landgrave that he makes 
his presence and his power most daringly felt. How, for example, 
he appeared there at a great masked ball, to which exactly twelve 
hundred persons had been invited by numbered tickets; how, 
when the twelve hundred had been, by arrangement, counted off 
in the hall, and aggregated apart, he was seen in majestic and 
solitary composure, leaning against a marble column, and it seemed 
as if the Landgrave and Adorni had but to give the word to their 
myrmidons to clutch him; but how there was nothing of that 
expected catastrophe, but only a scornful disappearance of the 
awful figure, as if in cloud or smoke, after some words from his 
hollow voice which left the Landgrave trembling : — for all this, 
and much more, there must be application inside the little volume 
itself. In reading it, you are as if in the heart of one of Mrs. 



38 DAVID MASSON 

Radcliffe's novels, with the usual paraphernalia of cloaks, nodding 
plumes, ghostly sounds, labyrinthine corridors and secret passages, 
pictures of ancestors on the walls, and the rest of it ; and you long 
to be out of such a curiosity shop of jumbled incredibilities, and 
to know the denouement. That does not come till after new epi- 
sodes of danger to Lady Paulina, new coils of marvel round the 
mysterious "Masque," and a second great assembly in the palace, 
with a vast mechanism of new preparations by the infuriated 
Landgrave for the discomfiture of his adversary. Let these be 
supposed; and let it be supposed that the 6th of September, 1634, 
has passed, and that the Swedes have been routed and the Im- 
perialists triumphant in the great battle of Nordlingan. What 
need then for further mystery? The hour has come for that 
revolution in Klosterheim which the Emperor himself had de- 
vised from Vienna, and manipulated in the secret despatches he 
had sent by the Lady Paulina. All is revealed in a crash. Maxi- 
milian is the true Landgrave, the hitherto undivulged son of the 
last good Landgrave; and the present usurper had come to his 
power by the murder of Maximilian's father, and maintained it 
by other crimes. In the crash of this revelation the gloomy 
usurper sinks, the last blow to the wretched man being the death 
of his daughter by a mistake of his own murderous order for the 
execution of the Lady Paulina. Maximilian marries Paulina; 
there are other more minute solutions and surprises; and the 
Klosterheimers, under their new Landgrave, are again a happy 
people. But who was the mysterious "Masque"? Who but 
Maximilian himself? Trao-doors and subterranean passages, 
his own dexterity, and collusion with the requisite number of 
citizens and students, and with an old seneschal of the tyrant, had 
done the whole business; and the only blood really shed in the 
course of it had been that of the poor seneschal, betrayed by 
accident, and stabbed by his master. 

Such is De Quincey's one- volume romance, a poor performance, 
doubtless for the sake of a little money, about the time when he 
settled in Edinburgh. Was he ashamed of it afterwards, that 
he did not reprint it ? There was no necessity for that ; for, though 
the story does not show the craft of a Sir Walter Scott, it is by no 
means bad of its preposterous kind. The style, at all events, is 
remarkably careful, with a marble beauty of sentence that makes 
one linger as one reads. 

There remains to be noticed, in the last place, that very special 



DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 39 

portion of De Quincey's writings of the imaginative order for 
which he claimed distinction above the rest, as illustrating "a 
mode of impassioned prose" but slightly represented before in 
English Literature. It may be questioned, however, whether 
the pieces for which he claimed this distinction are described most 
exactly by the phrase "impassioned prose." Their peculiarity 
is not so much that they are impassioned in any ordinary sense 
as that they are imaginative or poetical after a very definite and 
rather rare sort. It was one of the distinctions of De Quincey's 
intellect that it could pass from that ordinary or discursive exer- 
cise of itself which consists in expounding, reasoning, or investi- 
gating, to that poetic exercise of itself which consists in the for- 
mation of visions or phantasies; and it did, in fact, so pass on 
those occasions more particularly when it was moved by pathos 
or by the feeling of the mysterious and awful. What is most 
observable, therefore, in the pieces under notice is that they 
exhibit the operation of those two constitutional kinds of emotion 
upon De Quincey's intellectual activity, transmuting it from the 
common or discursive mode to that called poetic imagination. 
Inasmuch as it is the implicated feeling or sentiment that moves 
the intellectual process, and inasmuch as there are marks of this 
in the rhythmical or lyrical character of the result, there is no 
great harm in calling that result impassioned prose, especially if 
we keep to the limitation stipulated by De Quincey's own phrase, 
"a mode of impassioned prose"; but it is better, all in all, to 
define the writings under consideration as examples of a peculiar 
"mode of imaginative prOse," and, if further definition is wanted 
of this peculiar mode of prose poetry, to call it Prose Phantasy 
and Lyric, or Lyrical Prose Phantasy. De Quincey was con- 
sciously and deliberately an artist in this form of prose-poetry, and 
has left specimens of it that have very few parallels in English. 
One ought to remember, however, how much he must have been 
influenced by the previous example of Jean Paul Richter. Of his 
admiration of the famous German before he had himself begun 
his career of literature there is proof in his article on Richter pub- 
lished in the London Magazine in December, 1821, just after the 
appearance of his Confessions in their first form in the same 
Magazine ; and one observes that among the translated "analects " 
from Richter which accompanied or followed that article, and 
were intended to introduce Richter to the English public, were 
The Happy Life of a Parish Priest in Sweden and the Dream, 



40 DAVID MASSON 

upon the Universe, both of them specimens of Richter's peculiar 
art of prose-phantasy. There can be no doubt that Richter's 
example in such pieces influenced De Quincey permanently. 
But, though he may have learnt something from Richter, he was 
an original master in the same art. 

One might go back here on his Joan of Arc, and some of the 
other writings of which account has been already taken, and 
claim for them, or for parts of them, fresh recognition in our present 
connection. But let us confine ourselves to the writings to which 
De Quincey seems to have pointed more especially, and which 
have been already enumerated. 

To the famous passages of " dream-phantasy" in the Opium 
Confessions we need not readvert farther than to say that, extraor- 
dinary as they are as a whole, one may fairly object to parts of 
them, as to some of the similar dream-phantasies in Richter, that 
they fail by too much obtrusion of artistic self-consciousness in 
their construction, and sometimes also by a swooning of the power 
of clear and consecutive vision in a mere piling and excess of 
imagery and sound. The stroke on the mind at the time is not 
always equal to the look of the apparatus for inflicting it; and 
the memory does not retain a sufficient scar. No such objection 
can be urged against The Daughter of Lebanon, a fine visionary 
lyric of seven pages, figuring an early and miraculous conversion 
to Christianity in the person of an ideal girl of Damascus. Nor 
could any of De Quincey's readers give up the first two sections 
of The English Mail Coach, subtitled "The Glory of Motion" and 
"The Vision of Sudden Death." There is nothing in Jean Paul 
quite like these. 

In the first we are back in the old days between Trafalgar and 
Waterloo. Drawn up at the General Post Office in Lombard 
Street, and waiting for the hour to start, we see His Majesty's 
mails, — carriages, harness, horses, lamps, the dresses of driver 
and guard, all in the perfection of English equipment, and, if 
there has been news that day of a great victory, then the laurels, 
the oak leaves, the flowers, the ribbons, in addition. Seating 
ourselves beside the driver on one of the mails, we begin our jour- 
ney of three hundred miles along one of the great roads, north or 
west, leaving Lombard Street at a quarter past eight in the even- 
ing. How, once out into the country, we shoot along, horses at 
gallop, the breeze in our faces, hedges and trees and fields and 
homesteads rushing past us in the darkness which we and our 



DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS 41 

lamps are cleaving like a fiery arrow ! How, at every stopping- 
station, there are the lights and bustle at the inn- door, and the 
laurels and other bedizenments we carry are seen ere we have 
well stopped, and we shout "Badajoz" or "Salamanca" in ex- 
planation, or whatever else may have been the last victory, and 
the hostlers and other inn-folk take up the huzza, and it is one 
round of congratulation and hand-shaking while we stay ! But, 
punctually to the minute, having changed horses, and left the 
news palpitating in that neighbourhood, we are on again, 
horses at gallop, coach-lamps burning, and we beside the driver 
on the front seat, conscious that we are carrying the same news 
with us to neighbourhoods still ahead ! On, on, stage after stage, 
in the same fashion, still cleaving the darkness, the horse-hoofs 
always audible and the coach-lamps always burning, till the 
darkness yields to a silver glimmer and the glimmer to the glare 
of day ! — Such is the series of sensations De Quincey has con- 
trived to give us in his prose-poem called "The Glory of Motion." 
In the sequel, entitled "The Vision of Sudden Death," we are 
still on the same night journey by coach, or rather on one later 
night journey on the northern road between sixty and seventy 
years ago, with the difference that the glory of motion is now 
turned into horror. Prosaically described, the paper is a recol- 
lection of a fatal accident by collision of the mail, in a very dark 
part of the road, with a solitary vehicle containing two persons, one 
of them a woman ; but it is for the paper itself to show what the 
incident becomes in De Quincey's hands. — It passes into a third 
paper, still under the same general title of The English Mail 
Coach; which third paper indeed, bears the extraordinary subtitle 
of "Dream-Fugue, founded on the preceding theme of Sudden 
Death." I cannot say that this "dream-fugue," which is offered 
as a lyrical finale to the little series, in visionary coherence with 
the preceding pieces, accomplishes its purpose very successfully. 
It is liable to the objection which may be urged, as we have 
said, against other specimens of De Quincey in the peculiar art 
of dream-phantasy. The artifice is too apparent, and the mean- 
ing is all but lost in a mere vague of music. 

Of the three scraps of the Suspiria that are entitled to rank 
among the lyrical prose-phantasies, viz., Levana and Our Ladies 
of Sorrow, Savannah-la- Mar, and Memorial Suspiria, only the 
first is of much importance. But that scrap, written in De Quin- 
cey's later life, is of as high importance as anything he ever wrote. 



42 DAVID MASSON 

It is perhaps the highest and finest thing, and also the most 
constitutionally significant, in all De Quincey. Fortunately, the 
essential core of it can be quoted entire. All that it is necessary 
to premise is that "Levana" was the Roman Goddess of Educa- 
tion, the divinity who was supposed to "lift up" every newly- 
born human being from the earth in token that it should live, and 
to rule the influences to which it should be subject thenceforth 
till its character should be fully formed : — 



The Three Ladies of Sorrow 

I know them thoroughly, and have walked in all their kingdoms. Three 
sisters they are, of one mysterious household; and their paths are wide apart; 
but of their dominion there is no end. Them I saw often conversing with 
Levana, and sometimes about myself. Do they talk, then ? O, no ! Mighty 
phantoms like these disdain the infirmities of language. They may utter 
voices through the organs of man when they dwell in human hearts, but 
amongst themselves there is no voice nor sound; eternal silence reigns in 
their kingdoms. They spoke not, as they talked with Levana; they whis- 
pered not; they sang not; though oftentimes methought they might have 
sung: for I upon earth had heard their mysteries oftentimes deciphered by 
harp and timbrel, by dulcimer and organ. Like God, whose servants they 
are, they utter their pleasure, not by sounds that perish, or by words that go 
astray, but by signs in heaven, by changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, 
heraldries painted in darkness, and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of the 
brain. They wheeled in mazes ; / spelled the steps. They telegraphed from 
afar; I read the signals. They conspired together; and on the mirrors of 
darkness my eye traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols; mine are the 
words. 

What is it the sisters are ? What is it that they do ? Let me describe their 
form and their presence : if form it were that still fluctuated in its outline, 
or presence it were that forever advanced to the front or forever receded 
amongst shades. 

The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears. 
She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. 
She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of lamentation, — Rachel 
weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted. She it was that 
stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of 
innocents, and the little feet were stiffened forever, which, heard at times as 
they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts 
that were not unmarked in heaven. Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and 
sleepy, by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the 
heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish 
memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard the 
sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld the 
mustering of summer clouds. This sister, the eldest, it is that carries keys 
more than papal at her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. 
She, to my knowledge, sat all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, 



DE QUlNCEY'S WRITINGS 43 

him that so often and so gladly I talked with, whose pious daughter, eight 
years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play and 
village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. 
For this did God send her a great reward. In the spring time of the year, 
and whilst her own spring was budding, he recalled her to himself. But her 
blind father mourns forever over her ; still he dreams at midnight that the 
little guiding hand is locked within his own ; and still he awakens to a dark- 
ness that is now within a second and a deeper darkness. This Mater Lachry- 
marum also has been sitting all this winter of 1844-5 within the bedchamber 
of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter, not less pious, that vanished 
to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. 
By the power of the keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly in- 
truder, into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless chil- 
dren, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because 
she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honour with 
the title of Madonna. 

The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs. She 
never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no 
diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor 
subtle ; no man could read their story ; they would be found filled with perish- 
ing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her 
eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops forever, forever 
fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She groans not. But she sighs in- 
audibly at intervals. Her sister, Madonna, is oftentimes stormy and frantic, 
raging in the highest against heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But 
Our Lady of Sighs never clamours, never defies, dreams not of rebellious 
aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that belongs 
to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep. Whisper she may, 
but it is to herself in the twilight. Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary 
places that are desolate as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun 
has gone down to his rest. This sister is the visitor of the Pariah, of the Jew, 
of the bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galleys; of the English 
criminal in Norfolk Island, blotted out from the books of remembrance in 
sweet far-off England ; of the baffled penitent reverting his eyes forever upon 
a solitary grave, which to him seems the altar overthrown of some past and 
bloody sacrifice, on which altar no oblations can now be availing, whether 
towards pardon that he might implore, or towards reparation that he might 
attempt. Every slave that at noonday looks up to the tropical sun with timid 
reproach, as he points with one hand to the earth, our general mother, but for 
him a stepmother, — as he points with the other hand to the Bible, our 
general teacher, but against him sealed and sequestered; every woman 
sitting in darkness, without love to shelter her head, or hope to illu- 
mine her solitude, because the heaven-born instincts kindling in her nature 
germs of holy affections, which God implanted in her womanly bosom, hav- 
ing been stifled by social necessities, now burn sullenly to waste, like sepulchral 
lamps amongst the ancients; every nun defrauded of her unreturning May- 
time by wicked kinsmen, whom God will judge; all that are betrayed, and 
all that are rejected ; outcasts by traditionary law, and children of hereditary 
disgrace : — all these walk with Our Lady of Sighs. She also carries a key, 
but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem, 
and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very highest walks of 



44 DAVID MASSON 

man she finds chapels of her own; and even in glorious England there are 
some that, to the world, carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet 
secretly have received her mark upon their foreheads. 

But the third sister, who is also the youngest — ! Hush ! whisper whilst 
we talk of her ! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but 
within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, 
rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes, rising 
so high, might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot 
be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light 
of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day 
or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very 
ground. She is the defier of God. She is also the mother of lunacies and 
the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power, but narrow is the 
nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound 
nature has been upheaved by central convulsions, in whom the heart trembles 
and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest 
from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still 
with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this 
youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with tiger's 
leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she 
storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is 
Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness. 

This is prose-poetry; but it is more. It is a permanent addi- 
tion to the mythology of the human race. As the Graces are 
three, as the Fates are three, as the Furies are three, as the Muses 
were originally three, so may the varieties and degrees of misery 
that there are in the world, and the proportions of their distribu- 
tion among mankind, be represented to the human imagination 
forever by De Quincey's Three Ladies of Sorrow and his sketch 
of their figures and kingdoms. 



Ill 

SAMUEL JOHNSON 

( i 709-1 784) 

THE METAPHYSICAL POETS 
[From the Life of Cowley (1780) in the Lives of the Poets] 

Cowley, like other poets who have written with narrow 
views, and, instead of tracing intellectual pleasure to its natural 
sources in the mind of man, paid their court to temporary preju- 
dices, has been at one time too much praised, and too much neg- 
lected at another. 

Wit, like all other things subject by their nature to the choice 
of man, has its changes and fashions, and at different times takes 
different forms. About the beginning of the seventeenth century 
appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical 
poets; of whom, in a criticism on the works of Cowley, it is not 
improper to give some account. 

The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show 
their learning was their whole endeavour ; but, unluckily resolved 
to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote 
verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger 
better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that 
they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables. 

If the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry 
rixvYj fjufx-qTLKr), an imitative art, these writers will, without great 
wrong, lose their right to the name of poets; for they cannot be 
said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature nor 
life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the 
operations of intellect. 

Those, however, who deny them to be poets, allow them to be 
wits. Dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries that 

45 



46 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

they fall below Donne in wit, but maintains that they surpass 
him in poetry. 

If wit be well described by Pope, as being "that which has 
been often thought, but was never before so well expressed," 
they certainly never attained, nor ever sought it; for they en- 
deavoured to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of 
their diction. But Pope's account of wit is undoubtedly erro- 
neous: he depresses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it 
from strength of thought to happiness of language. 

If by a more noble and more adequate conception that be con- 
sidered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though 
not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be 
just; if it be that which he that never found it wonders how he 
missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom 
risen. Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they 
are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far 
from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently 
by what perverseness of industry they were ever found. 

But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be 
more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of dis- 
cordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery 
of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus 
defined, they have more than enough. The most heterogeneous 
ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ran- 
sacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning 
instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly 
thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes 
admires, is seldom pleased. 

From this account of their compositions it will be readily in- 
ferred that they were not successful in representing or moving 
the affections. As they were wholly employed on something 
unexpected and surprising, they had no regard to that uniformity 
of sentiment which enables us to conceive and to excite the pains 
and the pleasure of other minds: they never inquired what, on 
any occasion, they should have said or done; but wrote rather 
as beholders than partakers of human nature; as Beings looking 
upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure ; as Epicurean deities 
making remarks on the actions of men and the vicissitudes of 
life without interest and without emotion. Their courtship was 
void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow. Their wish 
was only to say what they hoped had never been said before. 



THE METAPHYSICAL POETS 47 

Nor was the sublime more within their reach than the pathetic ; 
for they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of 
thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first 
effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration. 
Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. 
Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not 
limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to mi- 
nuteness. It is with great propriety that subtlety, which in its 
original import means exility of particles, is taken in its meta- 
phorical meaning for nicety of distinction. Those writers who 
lay on the watch for novelty could have little hope of greatness; 
for great things cannot have escaped former observation. Their 
attempts were always analytic ; they broke every image into frag- 
ments: and amid no more represent, by their slender conceits 
and laboured particularities, the prospects of nature or the scenes 
of life, than he who dissects a sunbeam with a prism can exhibit 
the wide effulgence of a summer noon. 

What they wanted, however, of the sublime, they endeavoured 
to supply by hyperbole; their amplification had no limits; they 
left not only reason but fancy behind them; and produced com- 
binations of confused magnificence that not only could not be 
credited, but could not be imagined. 

Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly 
lost : if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, 
they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth : if their con- 
ceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write 
on their plan, it was at least necessary to read and think. No 
man could be born a metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity 
of a writer, by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imita- 
tions borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery and heredi- 
tary similes, by readiness of rhyme and volubility of syllables. 

In perusing the works of this race of authors, the mind is exer- 
cised either by recollection or inquiry; either something already 
learned is to be retrieved, or something new is to be examined. 
If their greatness seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises ; 
if the imagination is not always gratified, at least the powers of 
reflection and comparison are employed; and in the mass of 
materials which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine 
wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found, buried per- 
haps in grossness of expression, but useful to those who know 
their value; and such as, when they are expanded to perspicuity 



48 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

and polished to elegance, may give lustre to works which have 
more propriety though less copiousness of sentiment. 

This kind of writing, which was, I believe, borrowed from 
Marino and his followers, had been recommended by the example 
of Donne, a man of very extensive and various knowledge; and 
by Jonson, whose manner resembled that of Donne more in the 
ruggedness of his lines than in the cast of his sentiments. 

When their reputation was high, they had undoubtedly more 
imitators than time has left behind. Their immediate successors, 
of whom any remembrance can be said to remain, were Suckling, 
Waller, Denham, Cowley, Cleveland, and Milton. Denham 
and Waller sought another way to fame, by improving the harmony 
of our numbers. Milton tried the metaphysic style only in his 
lines upon Hobson the Carrier. Cowley adopted it, and excelled 
his predecessors, having as much sentiment and more music.l A 
Suckling neither improved versification, nor abounded in conceits.L/ 
The fashionable style remained chiefly with Cowley ; Suckling ( 
could not reach it, and Milton disdained it. f 

Critical remarks are not easily understood without examples, 
and I have therefore collected instances of the modes of writing 
by which this species of poets, for poets they were called by them- 
selves and their admirers, was eminently distinguished. 

As the authors of this race were perhaps more desirous of being 
admired than understood, they sometimes drew their conceits 
from recesses of learning not very much frequented by common 
readers of poetry. Thus Cowley on Knowledge: — 

The sacred tree midst the fair orchard grew; 

The phoenix Truth did on it rest, 

And built his perfum'd nest, 
That right Porphyrian tree which did true logick shew. 

Each leaf did learned notions give, 

And th' apples were demonstrative: 

So clear their colour and divine, 

The very shade they cast did other lights outshine. 

On Anacreon continuing a lover in his old age : — 

Love was with thy life entwin'd, 

Close as heat with fire is join'd, 

A powerful brand prescrib d the date 

Of thine, like Meleager's fate. 

The antiperistasis of age 

More enflam'd thy amorous rage. 



THE METAPHYSICAL POETS 49 

In the following verses we have an allusion to a Rabbinical 
opinion concerning Manna : — 

Variety I ask not: give me one 
To live perpetually upon. 
The person Love does to us fit, 
Like manna, has the taste of all in it. 

Thus Donne shows his medicinal knowledge in some encomi- 
astic verses: — 

In everything there naturally grows 

A Balsamum to keep it fresh and new, 
If 'twere not injur'd by extrinsique blows; 

Your youth and beauty are this balm in you. 
But you, of learning and religion, 

And virtue and such ingredients, have made 
A mithridate, whose operation 

Keeps off, or cures what can be done or said. 

Though the following lines of Donne, on the last night of the year, 
have something in them too scholastic, they are not inelegant: — 

This twilight of two years, not past nor next, 
Some emblem is of me, or I of this, 

Who, meteor-like, of stuff and form perplext, 
Whose what and where, in disputation is, 
If I should call me any thing, should miss. 

I sum the years and me, and find me not 
Debtor to th' old, nor creditor to th' new, 

That cannot say, my thanks I have forgot, 

Nor trust I this with hopes: and yet scarce true 
This bravery is, since these times shew'd me you. 

— Donne. 

Yet more abstruse and profound is Donne's reflection upon 
Man as a Microcosm : — 

If men be worlds, there is in every one 
Something to answer in some proportion 
All the world's riches: and in good men, this 
Virtue, our form's form, and our soul's soul is. 

Of thoughts so far-fetched as to be not only unexpected but 
unnatural, all their books are full. 



50 SAMUEL JOHNSON 



TO A LADY WHO WROTE POESIES FOR RINGS 

They, who above do various circles find, 

Say, like a ring th' aequator heaven does bind. 

When heaven shall be adorn'd by thee, 

(Which then more heaven than 'tis, will be) 

'Tis thou must write the poesy there, 

For it wanteth one as yet, 

Though the sun pass through 't twice a year, 

The sun, which is esteem'd the god of wit. — Cowley. 



The difficulties which have been raised about identity in philoso- 
phy are by Cowley, with still more perplexity, applied to Love : — ■ 

Five years ago (says story) I lov'd you, 
For which you call me most inconstant now; 
Pardon me, madam, you mistake the man; 
For I am not the same that I was then; 
No flesh is now the same 'twas then in me, 
And that my mind is chang'd yourself may see. 

The same thoughts to retain still, and intents, 

Were more inconstant far; for accidents 

Must of all things most strangely inconstant prove, 

If from one subject they t' another move : 

My members then, the father members were 

From whence these take their birth, which now are here. 

If then this body love what th' other did, 

'Twere incest, which by nature is forbid. 



The love of different women is, in geographical poetry, com- 
pared to travels, through different countries : — 

Hast thou not found each woman's breast 

(The land where thou hast travelled) 
Either by savages possest, 

Or wild, and uninhabited ? 

What joy could'st take, or what repose, 
In countries so unciviliz'd as those ? 
Lust, the scorching dog-star, here 

Rages with immoderate heat; 
Whilst Pride, the rugged Northern Bear, 

In others makes the cold too great. 
And when these are temperate known, 
The soil's all barren sand, or rocky stone. — Cowley. 



THE METAPHYSICAL POETS 51 

. A lover, burnt up by his affections, is compared to Egypt : — 

The fate of Egypt I sustain, 
And never feel the dew of rain. 
From clouds which in the head appear; 
But all my too much moisture owe 
To overflowings of the heart below. — Cowley. 

The lover supposes his lady acquainted with the ancient laws 
of augury and rites of sacrifice : — 

And yet this death of mine, I fear, 
Will ominous to her appear: 

When found in every other part, 
Her sacrifice is found without an heart. 

For the last tempest of my death 
Shall sigh out that too, with my breath. 

That the chaos was harmonized, has been recited of old; but 
whence the different sounds arose remained for a modern to 
discover : — 

Th' ungovern'd parts no correspondence knew, 

And artless war from thwarting motions grew; 

Till they to number and fixt rules were brought, 

Water and air he for the Tenor chose. 

Earth made the Base, the Treble flame arose. — Cowley. 

The tears of lovers are always of great poetical account, but 
Donne has extended them into worlds. If the lines are not easily 
understood, they may be read again : — 

On a round ball 
A workman, that hath copies by, can lay 
An Europe, Afric, and an Asia, 
And quickly make that, which was nothing, all. 

So doth each tear, 

Which thee doth wear, 
A globe, yea world, by that impression grow, 
Till thy tears mixt with mine do overflow 
This world, by waters sent from thee my heaven dissolved so. 

On reading the following lines, the reader may perhaps cry out, 
"Confusion worse confounded": — 

Here lies a she sun, and a he moon here, 

She gives the best light to his sphere, 

Or each is both, and all, and so 
They unto one another nothing owe. — Donne. 



52 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a 
telescope ? 

Though God be our true glass, through which we see 
All, since the being of all things is He, 
Yet are the trunks, which do to us derive 
Things, in proportion fit, by perspective 
Deeds of good men; for by their living here, 
Virtues, indeed remote, seem to be near. 

Who would imagine it possible that in a very few lines so many 
remote ideas could be brought together ? 

Since 'tis my doom, Love's undershrieve, 

Why this reprieve ? 
Why doth my She Advowson fly 

Incumbency? 
To sell thyself dost thou intend 

By candle's end, 
And hold the contrast thus in doubt, 

Life's taper out ? 
Think but how soon the market fails, 
Your sex lives faster than the males ; 
As if to measure age's span, 
The sober Julian were th' account of man, 
Whilst you live by the fleet Gregorian. — Cleveland. 

Of enormous and disgusting hyperboles, these may be exam- 
ples : — 

By every wind, that comes this way, 
Send me at least a sigh or two, 
Such and so many I'll repay 
As shall themselves make winds to get to you. — Cowley. 

In tears I'll waste these eyes, 
By Love so vainly fed; 
So lust of old the Deluge punished. — Cowley. 

All arm'd in brass the richest dress of war, 

(A dismal glorious sight) he shone afar. 

The sun himself started with sudden fright, 

To see his beams return so dismal bright. — Cowley. 

An universal consternation : — 

His bloody eyes he hurls round, his sharp paws 
Tear up the ground ; then runs he wild about, 
Lashing his angry tail and roaring out. 



THE METAPHYSICAL POETS 53 

Beasts creep into their dens, and tremble there ; 
Trees, though no wind is stirring, shake with fear; 
Silence and horror fill the place around : 
Echo itself dares scarce repeat the sound. — Cowley. 

Their fictions were often violent and unnatural. 

OF HIS MISTRESS BATHING 

The fish around her crowded, as they do 

To the false light that treacherous fishers shew, 

And all with as much ease might taken be, 

As she at first took me : 

For ne'er did light so clear 

Among the waves appear, 
Though every night the sun himself set there. — Cowley. 

The poetical effect of a lover's name upon glass : — 

My name engrav'd herein 
Doth contribute my firmness to this glass; 
Which, ever since that charm, hath been 
As hard as that which grav'd it was. — Donne. 

Their conceits were sometimes slight and trifling. 

ON AN INCONSTANT WOMAN 

He enjoys thy calmly sunshine now, 

And no breath stirring hears, 
In the clear heaven of thy brow, 

No smallest cloud appears. 

He sees thee gentle, fair and gay, 
And trusts the faithless April of thy May. — Cowley. 

Upon a paper written with the juice of lemon, and read by 
the fire : — 

Nothing yet in thee is seen : 

But when a genial heat warms thee within, 
A new-born wood of various lines there grows; 

Here buds an L, and there a B, 

Here sprouts a V, and there a T, 
And all the flourishing letters stand in rows. — Cowley. 

As they sought only for novelty, they did not much inquire 
whether their allusions were to things high or low, elegant or gross ; 
whether they compared the little to the great, or the great to the 
little. 



54 SAMUEL JOHNSON 



PHYSICK AND CHIRURGERY FOR A LOVER 

Gently, ah gently, madam, touch 

The wound, which you yourself have made; 
That pain must needs be very much, 

Which makes me of your hand afraid. 
Cordials of pity give me now, 
For I too weak for purgings grow. — Cowley. 



THE WORLD AND A CLOCK 

Mahol, th' inferior world's fantastic face, 
Through all the turns of matter's maze did trace; 
Great Nature's well-set clock in pieces took; 
On all the springs and smallest wheels did look 
Of life and motion; and with equal art 
Made up again the whole of every part. — Cowley. 



A coal-pit has not often found its poet; but, that it may not 
want its due honour, Cleveland has paralleled it with the sun : — 

The moderate value of our guiltless ore 
Makes no man atheist, and no woman whore; 
Yet why should hallow'd vestals' sacred shrine 
Deserve more honour than a flaming mine ? 
These pregnant wombs of heat would fitter be 
Than a few embers, for a deity. 

Had he our pits, the Persian would admire 
No sun, but warm's devotion at our fire: 
He'd leave the trotting whipster, and prefer 
Our profound Vulcan 'bove that waggoner. 
For wants he heat or light ? or would have store 
Of both ? 'tis here : and what can suns give more ? 
Nay, what's the sun but, in a different name, 
A coal-pit rampant, or a mine on flame ! 
Then let this truth reciprocally run 
The sun's heaven's coalery, and coals our sun. 



DEATH, A VOYAGE 

No family 
E'er rigg'd a soul for heaven's discovery, 
With whom more venturers might boldly dare 
Venture their stakes, with him in joy to share. — Donne. 



THE METAPHYSICAL POETS 55 

Their thoughts and expressions were sometimes grossly absurd, 
and such as no figures or license can reconcile to the understanding. 

A LOVER NEITHER DEAD NOR ALIVE 

Then down I laid my head, 

Down on cold earth; and for a while was dead, 

And my freed soul to a strange somewhere fled : 

Ah, sottish soul, said I, 

When back to its cage again I saw it fly : 

Fool to resume her broken chain ! 

And row her galley here again ! 

Fool, to that body to return 
Where it condemn'd and destin'd is to burn ! 

Once dead, how can it be, 
Death should a thing so pleasant seem to thee, 
That thou should'st come to live it o'er again in me ? — Cowley. 



A LOVER'S HEART A HAND GRENADO 

Wo to her stubborn heart, if once mine come 

Into the self-same room, 

'Twill tear and blow up all within, 
Like a grenado shot into a magazin. 
Then shall Love keep the ashes, and torn parts, 

Of both our broken hearts : 

Shall out of both one new one make ; 
From hers th' allay; from mine, the metal take. — Cowley. 



THE POETICAL PROPAGATION OF LIGHT 

The Prince's favour is diffus'd o'er all, 

From which all fortunes, names, and natures fall; 

Then from those wombs of stars, the Bride's bright eyes, 

At every glance a constellation flies, 
And sows the court with stars, and doth prevent 

In light and power, the all-ey'd firmament : 
First her eye kindles other ladies' eyes, 

Then from their beams their jewels' lustres rise; 
And from their jewels torches do take fire, 
And all is warmth, and light, and good desire. — Donne. 

They were in very little care to clothe their notions with ele- 
gance of dress, and therefore miss the notice and the praise which 
are often gained by those who think less, but are more diligent to 
adorn their thoughts. 



56 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

That a mistress beloved is fairer in idea than in reality is by 
Cowley thus expressed : — 

Thou in my fancy dost much higher stand, 
Than woman can be plac'd by Nature's hand; 
And I must needs, I'm sure, a loser be, 
To change thee, as thou'rt there, for very thee. 

That prayer and labour should cooperate are thus taught by 
Donne : — 

In none but us, are such mixt engines found, 
As hands of double office : for the ground 
We till with them; and them to heaven we raise; 
Who prayerless labours, or without this, prays, 
Doth but one half, that's none. 

By the same author, a common topic, the danger of procras- 
tination, is thus illustrated : — 

— That which I should have begun 

In my youth's morning, now late must be done; 

And I, as giddy travellers must do, 

Which stray or sleep all day, and having lost 

Light and strength, dark and tir'd must then ride post. 

All that Man has to do is to live and die ; the sum of humanity 
is comprehended by Donne in the following lines : — 

Think in how poor a prison thou didst lie; 

After, enabled but to suck and cry. 

Think, when 'twas grown to most, 'twas a poor inn, 

A province pack'd up in two yards of skin, 

And that usurp'd, or threaten'd with a rage 

Of sicknesses, or their true mother, age. 

But think that death hath now enfranchis'd thee; 

Thou hast thy expansion now, and liberty; 

Think, that a rusty piece discharg'd is flown 

In pieces, and the bullet is his own, 

And freely flies; this to thy soul allow, 

Think thy shell broke, think thy soul hatched but now. 

They were sometimes indelicate and disgusting. Cowley thus 
apostrophizes beauty : — 

— Thou tyrant, which leav'st no man free ! 

Thou subtle thief, from whom nought safe can be ! 

Thou murtherer, which hast kill'd, and devil, which would'st damn me. 



THE METAPHYSICAL POETS 57 

Thus he addresses his mistress : — 

Thou who, in many a propriety, 

So truly art the sun to me. 

Add one more likeness, which I'm sure you can, 

And let me and my sun beget a man. 

Thus he represents the meditations of a lover : — 

Though in thy thoughts scarce any tracts have been 

So much as of original sin, 
Such charms thy beauty wears as might 
Desires in dying confest saints excite. 

Thou with strange adultery 
Dost in each breast a brothel keep; 

Awake, all men do lust for thee, 
And some enjoy thee when they sleep. 

The true taste of tears : — 

Hither with crystal vials, lovers, come, 

And take my tears, which are Love's wine, 
And try your mistress' tears at home; 

For all are false, that taste not just like mine. — Donne. 

This is yet more indelicate : — 

As the sweet sweat of roses in a still 

As that which from chaf'd musk-cat's pores doth trill, 

As th' almighty balm of th' early East, 

Such are the sweet drops of my mistress' breast. 

And on her neck her skin such lustre sets, 

They seem no sweat-drops, but pearl coronets : 

Rank sweaty froth thy mistress' brow defiles. — Donne. 

Their expressions sometimes raise horror, when they intend 
perhaps to be pathetic : — 

As men in hell are from diseases free, 

So from all other ills am I. 

Free from their known formality : 
But all pains eminently lie in thee. — Cowley. 

They were not always strictly curious, whether the opinions 
from which they drew their illustrations were true ; it was enough 
that they were popular. Bacon remarks that some falsehoods 
are continued by tradition, because they supply commodious 
allusions. 



58 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

It gave a piteous groan, and so it broke; 
In vain it something would have spoke : 
The love within too strong for 'twas, 
Like poison put into a Venice-glass. — Cowley. 

In forming descriptions, they looked out, not for images, but 
for conceits. Night has been a common subject, which poets 
have contended to adorn. Dryden's Night is well known; Donne's 
is as follows : — 

Thou seest me here at midnight, now all rest: 
Time's dead low- water; when all minds divest 
To-morrow's business, when the labourers have 
Such rest in bed, that their last church-yard grave, 
Subject to change, will scarce be a type of this; 
Now when the client, whose last hearing is 
To-morrow, sleeps; when the condemned man, 
Who when he opes his eyes, must shut them then 
Again by death, although sad watch he keep, 
Doth practise dying by a little sleep, 
Thou at this midnight seest me. 

It must be, however, confessed of these writers that if they are 
upon common subjects often unnecessarily and unpoetically 
subtle, yet where scholastic speculation can be properly admitted, 
their copiousness and acuteness may justly be admired. What 
Cowley has written upon Hope shows an unequalled fertility of 
invention : — 

Hope, whose weak being ruin'd is, 

Alike if it succeed, and if it miss; 
Whom good or ill does equally confound, 
And both the horns of Fate's dilemma wound. 

Vain shadow, which dost vanish quite, 

Both at full noon and perfect night ! 

The stars have not a possibility 

Of blessing thee; 
If things then from their end we happy call, 
'Tis hope is the most hopeless thing of all. 

Hope, thou bold taster of delight, 

Who, whilst thou shouldst but taste, devour'st it quite ! 

Thou bring'st us an estate, yet leav'st us poor, 

By clogging it with legacies before ! 

The joys, which we entire should wed, 

Come deflower'd virgins to our bed; 
Good fortune without gain imported be, 

Such mighty customs paid to thee : 
For joy, like wine, kept close does better taste; 
If it take air before, its spirits waste. 



THE METAPHYSICAL POETS 59 

To the following comparison of a man that travels and his 
wife that stays at home, with a pair of compasses, it may be doubted 
whether absurdity or ingenuity has the better claim : — 

Our two souls therefore, which are one, 

Though I must go, endure not yet 
A breach, but an expansion, 

Like gold to airy thinness beat. 

If they be two, they are two so 

As stiff twin-compasses are two, 
Thy soul, the fixt foot, makes no show 

To move, but doth, if th' other do. 

And though it in the centre sit, 

Yet when the other far doth roam, 
It leans, and hearkens after it, 

And grows erect, as that comes home. 

Such wilt thou be to me, who must 

Like th' other foot, obliquely run. 
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 

And makes me end where I begun. — Donne. 

In all these examples it is apparent that whatever is improper 
or vicious is produced by a voluntary deviation from nature in 
pursuit of something new and strange, and that the writers fail 
to give delight by their desire of exciting admiration. 



IV 

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 

(1800-1859) 

MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS 

[Appeared in the Edinburgh Review for April, 1830, as a criticism of the follow- 
ing books : 

1 . The Omnipresence of the Deity : a Poem. By Robert Montgomery. Eleventh 

Edition. London: 1830. 

2. Satan: a Poem. By Robert Montgomery. Second Edition. London: 1830.] 

The wise men of antiquity loved to convey instruction under 
the covering of apologue; and though this practice is generally 
thought childish, we shall make no apology for adopting it on 
the present occasion. A generation which has bought eleven 
editions of a poem by Mr. Robert Montgomery may well con- 
descend to listen to a fable of Pilpay. 

A pious Brahmin, it is written, made a vow that on a certain 
day he would sacrifice a sheep, and on the appointed morning he 
went forth to buy one. There lived in his neighbourhood three 
rogues who knew of his vow, and laid a scheme for profiting by it. 
The first met him and said, " Oh Brahmin, wilt thou buy a sheep ? 
I have one fit for sacrifice." "It is for that very purpose," said 
the holy man, "that I came forth this day." Then the impostor 
opened a bag, and brought out of it an unclean beast, an ugly 
dog, lame and blind. Thereon the Brahmin cried out, "Wretch, 
who touchest things impure, and utterest things untrue; callest 
thou that cur a sheep?" "Truly," answered the other, "it is a 
sheep of the finest fleece, and of the sweetest flesh. Oh Brahmin, 
it will be an offering most acceptable to the gods." "Friend," 
said the Brahmin, "either thou or I must be blind." 

Just then one of the accomplices came up. "Praised be the 
gods," said the second rogue, "that I have been saved the trouble 
of going to the market for a sheep ! This is such a sheep as I 

60 



MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS 6 1 

wanted. For how much wilt thou sell it?" When the Brahmin 
heard this, his mind waved to and fro, like one swinging in the 
air at a holy festival. "Sir," said he to the newcomer, "take 
heed what thou dost; this is no sheep, but an unclean cur." " Oh 
Brahmin," said the newcomer, "thou art drunk or mad !" 

At this time the third confederate drew near. "Let us ask this 
man," said the Brahmin, "what the creature is, and I will stand 
by what he shall say." To this the others agreed; and the 
Brahmin called out, " Oh stranger, what dost thou call this beast ?" 
"Surely, oh Brahmin," said the knave, "it is a fine sheep." Then 
the Brahmin said, "Surely the gods have taken away my senses;" 
and he asked pardon of him who carried the dog, and bought it 
for a measure of rice and a pot of ghee, and offered it up to the 
gods, who, being wroth at this unclean sacrifice, smote him with 
a sore disease in all his joints. 

Thus, or nearly thus, if we remember rightly, runs the story 
of the Sanscrit ^Esop. The moral, like the moral of every fable 
that is worth the telling, lies on the surface. The writer evidently 
means to caution us against the practices of puffers, a class of 
people who have more than once talked the public into the most 
absurd errors, but who surely never played a more curious or a 
more difficult trick than when they passed Mr. Robert Mont- 
gomery off upon the world as a great poet. 

In an age in which there are so few readers that a writer cannot 
subsist on the sum arising from the sale of his works, no man 
who has not an independent fortune can devote himself to literary 
pursuits, unless he is assisted by patronage. In such an age, 
accordingly, men of letters too often pass their lives in dangling 
at the heels of the wealthy and powerful ; and all the faults which 
dependence tends to produce, pass into their character. They 
become the parasites and slaves of the great. It is melancholy 
to think how many of the highest and most exquisitely formed of 
human intellects have been condemned to the ignominious labour 
of disposing the commonplaces of adulation in new forms and 
brightening them into new splendour. Horace invoking Augustus 
in the most enthusiastic language of religious veneration; Statius 
flattering a tyrant, and the minion of a tyrant, for a morsel of 
bread; Ariosto versifying the whole genealogy of a niggardly 
patron ; Tasso extolling the heroic virtues of the wretched creature 
who locked him up in a madhouse: these are but a few of the 
instances which might easily be given of the degradation to which 



62 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAU LAY 

those must submit who, not possessing a competent fortune, are 
resolved to write when there are scarcely any who read. 

This evil the progress of the human mind tends to remove. As 
a taste for books becomes more and more common, the patronage of 
individuals becomes less and less necessary. In the middle of the 
last century a marked change took place. The tone of literary 
men, both in this country and in France, became higher and 
more independent. Pope boasted that he was the "one poet" 
who had "pleased by manly ways"; he derided the soft dedica- 
tions with which Halifax had been fed, asserted his own superi- 
ority over the pensioned Boileau, and gloried in being not the 
follower, but the friend, of nobles and princes. The explanation 
of all this is very simple. Pope was the first Englishman who, 
by the mere sale of his writings, realized a sum which enabled him 
to live in comfort and in perfect independence. Johnson extols 
him for the magnanimity which he showed in inscribing his Iliad, 
not to a minister or a peer, but to Congreve. In our time this would 
scarcely be a subject for praise. Nobody is astonished when Mr. 
Moore pays a compliment of this kind to Sir Walter Scott, or 
Sir Walter Scott to Mr. Moore. The idea of either of those gentle- 
men looking out for some lord who would be likely to give him 
a few guineas in return for a fulsome dedication seems laughably 
incongruous. Yet this is exactly what Dry den or Otway would 
have done; and it would be hard to blame them for it. Otway 
is said to have been choked with a piece of bread which he de- 
voured in the rage of hunger; and, whether this story be true or 
false, he was beyond all question miserably poor. Dryden, at 
near seventy, when at the head of the literary men of England, 
without equal or second, received three hundred pounds for his 
Fables, a collection of ten thousand verses, and of such verses as 
no man then living, except himself, could have produced. Pope, 
at thirty, had laid up between six and seven thousand pounds, 
the fruits of his poetry. It was not, we suspect, because he had 
a higher spirit or a more scrupulous conscience than his prede- 
cessors, but because he had a larger income, that he kept up the 
dignity of the literary character so much better than they had 
done. 

From the time of Pope to the present day the readers have been 
constantly becoming more and more numerous, and the writers, 
consequently, more and more independent. It is assuredly a 
great evil that men, fitted by their talents and acquirements to 



MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS 63 

enlighten and charm the world, should be reduced to the necessity 
of flattering wicked and foolish patrons in return for the suste- 
nance of life. But, though we heartily rejoice that this evil is 
removed, we cannot but see with concern that another evil has 
succeeded to it. The public is now the patron, and a most liberal 
patron. All that the rich and powerful bestowed on authors 
from the time of Maecenas to that of Harley would not, we appre- 
hend, make up a sum equal to that which has been paid by English 
booksellers to authors during the last fifty years. Men of letters 
have accordingly ceased to court individuals, and have begun to 
court the public. They formerly used flattery. They now use 
puffing. 

Whether the old or the new vice be the worse, whether those 
who formerly lavished insincere praise on others, or those who 
now contrive by every art of beggary and bribery to stun the public 
with praises of themselves, disgrace their vocation the more deeply, 
we shall not attempt to decide. But of this we are sure, that it is 
high time to make a stand against the new trickery. The puff- 
ing of books is now so shamefully and so successfully carried on 
that it is the duty of all who are anxious for the purity of the national 
taste, or for the honour of the literary character, to join in dis- 
countenancing the practice. All the pens that ever were employed 
in magnifying Bish's lucky office, Romanis's fleecy hosiery, Pack- 
wood's razor strops, and Rowland's Kalydor, all the placard- 
bearers of Dr. Eady, all the wall-chalkers of Day and Martin, 
seem to have taken service with the poets and novelists of this 
generation. Devices which in the lowest trades are considered as 
disreputable are adopted without scruple, and improved upon 
with a despicable ingenuity, by people engaged in a pursuit which 
never was and never will be considered as a mere trade by any 
man of honour and virtue. A butcher of the higher class disdains 
to ticket his meat. A mercer of the higher class would be ashamed 
to hang up papers in his window inviting the passers-by to look 
at the stock of a bankrupt, all of the first quality, and going for 
half the value. We expect some reserve, some decent pride, in 
our hatter and our bootmaker. But no artifice by which notoriety 
can be obtained is thought too abject for a man of letters. 

It is amusing to think over the history of most of the publica- 
tions which have had a run during the last few years. The pub- 
lisher is often the publisher of some periodical work. In this 
periodical work the first flourish of trumpets is sounded. The 



64 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAU LAY 

peal is then echoed and reechoed by all the other periodical 
works over which the publisher, or the author, or the author's 
coterie, may have any influence. The newspapers are for a 
fortnight filled with puffs of all the various kinds which Sheridan 
enumerated, direct, oblique, and collusive. Sometimes the praise 
is laid on thick for simple-minded people. "Pathetic," "sub- 
lime," "splendid," "graceful," "brilliant wit," "exquisite hu- 
mour," and other phrases equally flattering, fall in a shower as 
thick and as sweet as the sugar-plums at a Roman carnival. 
Sometimes greater art is used. A sinecure has been offered to 
the writer if he would suppress his work, or if he would even 
soften down a few of his incomparable portraits. A distinguished 
military and political character has challenged the inimitable 
satirist of the vices of the great; and the puffer is glad to learn 
that the parties have been bound over to keep the peace. Some- 
times it is thought expedient that the puffer should put on a grave 
face, and utter his panegyric in the form of admonition. "Such 
attacks on private character cannot be too much condemned. 
Even the exuberant wit of our author, and the irresistible power 
of his withering sarcasm, are no excuses for that utter disregard 
which he manifests for the feelings of others. We cannot but 
wonder that a writer of such transcendent talents, a writer who 
is evidently no stranger to the kindly charities and sensibilities 
of our nature, should show so little tenderness to the foibles of 
noble and distinguished individuals, with whom it is clear, from 
every page of his work, that he must have been constantly mingling 
in society." These are but tame and feeble imitations of the 
paragraphs with which the daily papers are filled whenever an 
attorney's clerk or an apothecary's assistant undertakes to tell 
the public in bad English and worse French, how people tie their 
neckcloths and eat their dinners in Grosvenor Square. The 
editors of the higher and more respectable newspapers usually 
prefix the words "Advertisement," or "From a Correspondent," 
to such paragraphs. But this makes little difference. The 
panegyric is extracted, and the significant heading omitted. The 
fulsome eulogy makes its appearance on the covers of all the Re- 
views and Magazines, with Times or Globe affixed, though the 
editors of the Times and the Globe have no more to do with it 
than with Mr. Goss's way of making old rakes young again. 

That people who live by personal slander should practise these 
arts is not surprising. Those who stoop to write calumnious 



MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS 65 

books may well stoop to puff them; and that the basest of all 
trades should be carried on in the basest of all manners is quite 
proper and as it should be. But how any man who has the least 
self-respect, the least regard for his own personal dignity, can con- 
descend to persecute the public with this Rag-fair importunity, 
we do not understand. Extreme poverty may, indeed, in some 
degree, be an excuse for employing these shifts, as it may be an 
excuse for stealing a leg of mutton. But we really think that a 
man of spirit and delicacy would quite as soon satisfy his wants 
in the one way as in the other. 

It is no excuse for an author that the praises of journalists are 
procured by the money or influence of his publishers, and not 
by his own. It is his business to take such precautions as may 
prevent others from doing what must degrade him. It is for his 
honour as a gentleman, and, if he is really a man of talents, it will 
eventually be for his honour and interest as a writer, that his 
works should come before the public recommended by their own 
merits alone, and should be discussed with perfect freedom. If 
his objects be really such as he may own without shame, he will 
find that they will, in the long-run, be better attained by suffering 
the voice of criticism to be fairly heard. At present, we too often 
see a writer attempting to obtain literary fame as Shakespeare's 
usurper obtains sovereignty. The publisher plays Buckingham 
to the author's Richard. Some few creatures of the conspiracy 
are dexterously disposed here and there in the crowd. It is the 
business of these hirelings to throw up their caps, and clap their 
hands, and utter their vivas'. The rabble at first stare and wonder, 
and at last join in shouting for shouting's sake; and thus a crown 
is placed on a head which has no right to it, by the huzzas of a 
few servile dependants. 

The opinion of the great body of the reading public is very 
materially influenced even by the unsupported assertions of those 
who assume a right to criticise. Nor is the public altogether to 
blame on this account. Most even of those who have really a 
great enjoyment in reading are in the same state, with respect to 
a book, in which a man who has never given particular attention 
to the art of painting is with respect to a picture. Every man 
who has the least sensibility or imagination derives a certain 
pleasure from pictures. Yet a man of the highest and finest 
intellect might, unless he had formed his taste by contemplating 
the best pictures, be easily persuaded by a knot of connoisseurs 



66 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAU LAY 

that the worst daub in Somerset House was a miracle of art. If 
he deserves to be laughed at, it is not for his ignorance of pictures, 
but for his ignorance of men. He knows that there is a delicacy 
of taste in painting which he does not possess, that he cannot dis- 
tinguish hands, as practised judges distinguish them, that he is 
not familiar with the finest models, that he has never looked at them 
with close attention, and that, when the general effect of a piece 
has pleased him or displeased him, he has never troubled himself 
to ascertain why. When, therefore, people, whom he thinks 
more competent to judge than himself, and of whose sincerity he 
entertains no doubt, assure him that a particular work is exqui- 
sitely beautiful, he takes it for granted that they must be in the 
right. He returns to the examination, resolved to find or imagine 
beauties; and, if he can work himself up into something like 
admiration, he exults in his own proficiency. 

Just such is the manner in which nine readers out of ten judge 
of a book. They are ashamed to dislike what men who speak 
as having authority declare to be good. At present, however 
contemptible a poem or a novel may be, there is not the least diffi- 
culty in procuring favourable notices of it from all sorts of pub- 
lications, daily, weekly, and monthly. In the meantime, little 
or nothing is said on the other side. The author and the publisher 
are interested in crying up the book. Nobody has any very strong 
interest in crying it down. Those who are best fitted to guide 
the public opinion think it beneath them to expose mere nonsense, 
and comfort themselves by reflecting that such popularity cannot 
last. This contemptuous lenity has been carried too far. It is 
perfectly true that reputations which have been forced into an 
unnatural bloom fade almost as soon as they have expanded; 
nor have we any apprehensions that puffing will ever raise any 
scribbler to the rank of a classic. It is indeed amusing to turn 
over some late volumes of periodical works, and to see how many 
immortal productions have, within a few months, been gathered 
to the Poems of Blackmore and the novels of Mrs. Behn; how 
many "profound views of human nature," and " exquisite delinea- 
tions of fashionable manners," and "vernal, and sunny, and 
refreshing thoughts," and "high imaginings," and "young breath- 
ings," and "embodyings," and "pinings," and " minglings with 
the beauty of the universe," and "harmonies which dissolve the 
soul in a passionate sense of loveliness and divinity," the world 
has contrived to forget. The names of the books and of the 



MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS 67 

writers are buried in as deep an oblivion as the name of the builder 
of Stonehenge. Some of the well-puffed fashionable novels of 
eighteen hundred and twenty-nine hold the pastry of eighteen 
hundred and thirty; and others, which are now extolled in lan- 
guage almost too high-flown for the merits of Don Quixote, will, 
we have no doubt, line the trunks of eighteen hundred and thirty- 
one. But, though we have no apprehensions that puffing will 
ever confer permanent reputation on the undeserving, we still 
think its influence most pernicious. Men of real merit will, if 
they persevere, at last reach the station to which they are entitled, 
and intruders will be ejected with contempt and derision. But 
it is no small evil that the avenues to fame should be blocked up 
by a swarm of noisy, pushing, elbowing pretenders, who, though 
they will not ultimately be able to make good their own entrance, 
hinder, in the meantime, those who have a right to enter. All 
who will not disgrace themselves by joining in the unseemly 
scuffle must expect to be at first hustled and shouldered back. 
Some men of talents, accordingly, turn away in dejection from 
pursuits in which success appears to bear no proportion to desert. 
Others employ in self-defence the means by which competitors, 
far inferior to themselves, appear for a time to obtain a decided 
advantage. There are few who have sufficient confidence in 
their own powers and sufficient elevation of mind, to wait with 
secure and contemptuous patience, while dunce after dunce presses 
before them. Those who will not stoop to the baseness of the 
modern fashion are too often discouraged. Those who do stoop 
to it are always degraded. 

We have of late observed with great pleasure some symptoms 
which lead us to hope that respectable literary men of all parties 
are beginning to be impatient of this insufferable nuisance. And 
we purpose to do what in us lies for the abating of it. We do not 
think that we can more usefully assist in this good work than by 
showing our honest countrymen what that sort of poetry is which 
puffing can drive through eleven editions, and how easily any 
bellman might, if a bellman would stoop to the necessary degree 
of meanness, become a "master-spirit of the age." We have no N . 

enmity to Mr. Robert Montgomery. We know nothing whatever 
about him, except what we have learned from his books, and 
from the portrait prefixed to one of them, in which he appears to 
be doing his very best to look like a man of genius and sensibility, 
though with less success than his strenuous exertions deserve. 



68 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 

We select him, because his works have received more enthusiastic 
praise, and have deserved more unmixed contempt, than any 
which, as far as our knowledge extends, have appeared within the 
last three or four years. His writing bears the same relation to 
poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture. There are 
colours in the Turkey carpet out of which a picture might be made. 
There are words in Mr. Montgomery's writing which, when dis- 
posed in certain orders and combinations, have made, and will 
again make, good poetry. But, as they now stand, they seem to be 
put together on principle in such a manner as to give no image of 
anything "in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the 
waters under the earth." 

The poem on the Omnipresence of the Deity commences with 
a description of the creation, in which we can find only one thought 
which has the least pretension to ingenuity, and that one thought 
is stolen from Dryden, and marred in the stealing : — 

"Last, softly beautiful, as music's close, 
Angelic woman into being rose." 

The all-pervading influence of the Supreme Being is then described 
in a few tolerable lines borrowed from Pope, and a great many 
intolerable lines of Mr. Robert Montgomery's own. The follow- 
ing may stand as a specimen : — 

"But who could trace Thine unrestricted course, 
Though Fancy followed with immortal force ? 
There's not a blossom fondled by the breeze, 
There's not a fruit that beautifies the trees, 
There's not a particle in sea or air, 
But nature owns thy plastic influence there ! 
With fearful gaze, still be it mine to see 
How all is fill'd and vivified by Thee; 
Upon thy mirror, earth's majestic view, 
To paint Thy Presence, and to feel it too." 

The last two lines contain an excellent specimen of Mr. Robert 
Montgomery's Turkey carpet style of writing. The majestic 
view of earth is the mirror of God's presence ; and on this mirror 
Mr. Robert Montgomery paints God's presence. The use of a 
mirror, we submit, is not to be painted upon. 

A few more lines, as bad as those which we have quoted, bring 
us to one of the most amusing instances of literary pilfering which 
we remember. It might be of use to plagiarists to know, as a 



MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS 69 

general rule, that what they steal is, to employ a phrase common 
in advertisements, of no use to any but the right owner. We never 
fell in, however, with any plunderer who so little understood how 
to turn his booty to good account as Mr. Montgomery. Lord 
Byron, in a passage which everybody knows by heart, has said, 
addressing the sea, 

"Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow." 

Mr. Robert Montgomery very coolly appropriates the image and 
reproduces the stolen goods in the following form : — 

"And thou, vast Ocean, on whose awful face 
Time's iron feet can print no ruin-trace." 

So may such ill-got gains ever prosper ! 

The effect which the Ocean has on Atheists is then described 
in the following lofty lines : — 

" Oh ! never did the dark-soul'd Atheist stand, 
And watch the breakers boiling on the strand, 
And, while Creation stagger'd at his nod, 
Mock the dread presence of the mighty God ! 
We hear Him in the wind-heaved ocean's roar, 
Hurling her billowy crags upon the shore; 
We hear Him in the riot of the blast, 
And shake, while rush the raving whirlwinds past!" 

If Mr. Robert Montgomery's genius were not far too free and 
aspiring to be shackled by the rules of syntax, we should suppose 
that it is at the nod of the Atheist that creation staggers. But 
Mr. Robert Montgomery's readers must take such grammar as 
they can get, and be thankful. 

A few more lines bring us to another instance of unprofitable 
theft. Sir Walter Scott has these lines in the Lord of the Isles : — 

"The dew that on the violet lies, 
Mocks the dark lustre of thine eyes." 

This is pretty taken separately, and, as is always the case with the 
good things of good writers, much prettier in its place than can 
even be conceived by those who see it only detached from the 
context. Now for Mr. Montgomery : — 

"And the bright dew-bead on the bramble lies, 
Like liquid rapture upon beauty's eyes." 



70 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAU LAY 

The comparison of a violet, bright with the dew, to a woman's eyes, 
is as perfect as a comparison can be. Sir Walter's lines are part 
of a song addressed to a woman at daybreak, when the violets are 
bathed in dew ; and the comparison is therefore peculiarly natural 
and graceful. Dew on a bramble is no more like a woman's 
eyes than dew anywhere else. There is a very pretty Eastern 
tale of which the fate of plagiarists often reminds us. The slave 
of a magician saw his master wave his wand, and heard him give 
orders to the spirits who arose at the summons. The slave stole 
the wand, and waved it himself in the air; but he had not observed 
that his master used the left hand for that purpose. The spirits 
thus irregularly summoned tore the thief to pieces instead of 
obeying his orders. There are very few who can safely venture 
to conjure with the rod of Sir Walter; and Mr. Robert Mont- 
gomery is not one of them. 

Mr. Campbell, in one of his most pleasing pieces, has this line, 

"The sentinel stars set their watch in the sky." 

The thought is good, and has a very striking propriety where Mr. 
Campbell has placed it, in the mouth of a soldier telling his dream. 
But, though Shakespeare assures us that " every true man's apparel 
fits your thief," it is by no means the case, as we have already 
seen, that every true poet's similitude fits your plagiarist. Let 
us see how Mr. Robert Montgomery uses the image : — 

"Ye quenchless stars! so eloquently bright, 
Untroubled sentries of the shadowy night, 
While half the world is lapp'd in downy dreams, 
And round the lattice creep your midnight beams, 
How sweet to gaze upon your placid eyes, 
In lambent beauty looking from the skies." 

Certainly the ideas of eloquence, of untroubled repose, of placid 
eyes, of the lambent beauty on which it is sweet to gaze, harmo- 
nize admirably with the idea of a sentry. 

We would not be understood, however, to say, that Mr. Robert 
Montgomery cannot make similitudes for himself. A very few 
lines further on, we find one which has every mark of originality, 
and on which, we will be bound, none of the poets whom he has 
plundered will ever think of making reprisals : — 

"The soul, aspiring, pants its source to mount, 
As streams meander level with their fount." 



MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS 71 

We take this to be, on the whole, the worst similitude in the 
world. In the first place, no stream meanders, or can possibly 
meander, level with its fount. In the next place, if streams did 
meander level with their founts, no two motions can be less like 
each other than that of meandering level and that of mounting 
upwards. 

We have then an apostrophe to the Deity, couched in terms 
which, in any writer who dealt in meanings, we should call pro- 
fane, but to which we suppose Mr. Robert Montgomery attaches 
no idea whatever : — 

"Yes! pause and think, within one fleeting hour, 
How vast a universe obeys Thy power; 
Unseen, but felt, Thine interfused control 
Works in each atom, and pervades the whole; 
Expands the blossom, and erects the tree, 
Conducts each vapour, and commands each sea, 
Beams in each ray, bids whirlwinds be unfurl'd, 
Unrols the thunder, and upheaves a world I" 

No field-preacher surely ever carried his irreverent familiarity 
so far as to bid the Supreme Being stop and think on the impor- 
tance of the interests which are under His care. The grotesque 
indecency of such an address throws into shade the subordinate 
absurdities of the passage, the unfurling of whirlwinds, the unroll- 
ing of thunder, and the upheaving of worlds. 

Then comes a curious specimen of our poet's English : — 

"Yet not alone created realms engage 
Thy faultless wisdom, grand, primeval sage ! 
For all the thronging woes to life allied 
Thy mercy tempers, and thy cares provide." 

We should be glad to know what the word "For" means here. 
If it is a preposition, it makes nonsense of the words, "Thy 
mercy tempers." If it is an adverb, it makes nonsense of the 
words, "Thy cares provide." These beauties we have taken, 
almost at random, from the first part of the poem. The 
second part is a series of descriptions of various events, a 
battle, a murder, an execution, a marriage, a funeral, and so forth. 
Mr. Robert Montgomery terminates each of these descriptions 
by assuring us that the Deity was present at the battle, murder, 
execution, marriage or funeral in question. And this proposition 
which might be safely predicated of every event that ever happened 



72 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAU LAY 

or ever will happen, forms the only link which connects these 
descriptions with the subject or with each other. 

How the descriptions are executed our readers are probably 
by this time able to conjecture. The battle is made up of the 
battles of all ages and nations: " red-mouthed cannons, up- 
roaring to the clouds," and " hands grasping firm the glittering 
shield." The only military operations of which this part of the 
poem reminds us, are those which reduced the Abbey of Qued- 
linburgh to submission, the Templar with his cross, the Austrian 
and Prussian grenadiers in full uniform, and Curtius and Dentatus 
with their battering-ram. We ought not to pass unnoticed the 
slain war-horse, who will no more 

"Roll his red eye, and rally for the fight;" 

or the slain warrior who, while "lying on his bleeding breast," 
contrives to "stare ghastly and grimly on the skies." As to this 
last exploit, we can only say, as Dante did on a similar occasion, 

"Forse per forza gia di' parlasia 
Si stravolse cosi alcun del tutto: 
Ma io nol vidi, ne credo che sia." * 

The tempest is thus described : — 

"But lo ! around the marsh'lling clouds unite, 
Like thick battalions halting for the fight; 
The sun sinks back, the tempest spirits sweep 
Fierce through the air and flutter on the deep. 
Till from their caverns rush the maniac blasts, 
Tear the loose sails, and split the creaking masts, 
And the lash'd billows, rolling in a train, 
Rear their white heads, and race along the main!" 

What, we should like to know, is the difference between the 
two operations which Mr. Robert Montgomery so accurately dis- 
tinguishes from each other, the fierce sweeping of the tempest- 
spirits through the air, and the rushing of the maniac blasts from 
their caverns? And why does the former operation end exactly 
when the latter commences ? 

1 ["Perchance indeed by violence of palsy 

Some one has been thus wholly turned awry; 
But I ne'er saw it, nor believe it can be." — Longfellow's 
translation of Inferno, XX., 16-18.] 



MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS 73 

We cannot stop over each of Mr. Robert Montgomery's descrip- 
tions. We have a shipwrecked sailor, who " visions a viewless 
temple in the air"; a murderer who stands on a heath, "with 
ashy lips, in cold convulsion spread"; a pious man, to whom, 
as he lies in bed at night, 

"The panorama of past life appears, 
Warms his pure mind, and melts it into tears;" 

a traveller, who loses his way, owing to the thickness of the "cloud 
battalion," and the want of "heaven-lamps, to beam their holy 
light." We have a description of a convicted felon, stolen from 
that incomparable passage in Crabbe's Borough, which has made 
many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child. We can, how- 
ever, conscientiously declare that persons of the most excitable 
sensibility may safely venture upon Mr. Robert Montgomery's 
version. Then we have the "poor, mindless, pale-faced maniac 
boy," who 

"Rolls his vacant eye, 
To greet the glowing fancies of the sky." 

What are the glowing fancies of the sky? And what is the 
meaning of the two lines which almost immediately follow? 

"A soulless thing, a spirit of the woods, 
He loves to commune with the fields and floods." 

How can a soulless thing be a spirit ? Then comes a panegyric 
on the Sunday. A baptism follows; after that a marriage: and 
we then proceed, in due course, to the visitation of the sick, and 
the burial of the dead. 

Often as Death has been personified, Mr. Montgomery has 
found something new to say about him : — 

" O Death ! thou dreadless vanquisher of earth, 
The Elements shrank blasted at thy birth ! 
Careering round the world like tempest wind, 
Martyrs before, and victims strew'd behind; 
Ages on ages cannot grapple thee, 
Dragging the world into eternity !" 

If there be any one line in this passage about which we are more 
in the dark than about the rest, it is the fourth. What the differ- 
ence may be between the victims and the martyrs, and why the 



74 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 

martyrs are to lie before Death, and the victims behind him, are 
to us great mysteries. 

We now come to the third part, of which we may say with honest 
Cassio, "Why, this is a more excellent song than the other." Mr. 
Robert Montgomery is very severe on the infidels, and undertakes 
to prove, that, as he elegantly expresses it, 

"One great Enchanter helm'd the harmonious whole." 

What an enchanter has to do with helming, or what a helm has 
to do with harmony, he does not explain. He proceeds with his 
argument thus : — 

"And dare men dream that dismal Chance has framed 
All that the eye perceives, or tongue has named; 
The spacious world, and all its wonders, born 
Designless, self-created, and forlorn; 
Like to the flashing bubbles on a stream, 
Fire from the cloud, or phantom in a dream?" 

We should be sorry to stake our faith in a higher Power on Mr. 
Robert Montgomery's logic. He informs us that lightning is 
designless and self-created. If he can believe this, we cannot 
conceive why he may not believe that the whole universe is design- 
less and self-created. A few lines before, he tells us that it is the 
Deity who bids "thunder rattle from the skiey deep." His theory 
is therefore this, that God made the thunder, but that the light- 
ning made itself. 

But Mr. Robert Montgomery's metaphysics are not at present 
our game. He proceeds to set forth the fearful effects of Athe- 
ism: — 

"Then, blood-stain'd Murder, bare thy hideous arm, 

And thou, Rebellion, welter in thy storm : 

Awake, ye spirits of avenging crime; 

Burst from your bonds, and battle with the time!" 

Mr. Robert Montgomery is fond of personification, and belongs, 
we need not say, to that school of poets who hold that nothing 
more is necessary to a personification in poetry than to begin a 
word with a capital letter. Murder may, without impropriety, 
bare her arm, as she did long ago, in Mr. Campbell's Pleasures 
of Hope. But what possible motive Rebellion can have for welter- 
ing in her storm, what avenging crime may be, who its spirits 



MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS 75 

may be, why they should be burst from their bonds, what their 
bonds may be, why they should battle with the time, what the 
time may be, and what a battle between the time and the spirits 
of avenging crime would resemble, we must confess ourselves 
quite unable to understand. 

"And here let Memory turn her tearful glance 
On the dark horrors of tumultuous France, 
When blood and blasphemy defiled her land, 
And fierce Rebellion shook her savage hand." 

Whether Rebellion shakes her own hand, shakes the hand of 
Memory, or shakes the hand of France, or what any one of these 
three metaphors would mean, we know no more than we know 
what is the sense of the following passage : — 

" Let the foul orgies of infuriate crime 
Picture the raging havoc of that time, 
When leagued Rebellion march'd to kindle man, 
Fright in her rear, and Murder in her van. 
And thou, sweet flower of Austria, slaughter' d Queen, 
Who dropp'd no tear upon the dreadful scene, 
When gush'd the life-blood from thine angel form, 
And martyr' d beauty perish' d in the storm, 
Once worshipp'd paragon of all who saw, 
Thy look obedience, and thy smile a law." 

What is the distinction between the foul orgies and the raging 
havoc which the foul orgies are to picture ? Why does Fright go 
behind Rebellion, and Murder before ? W r hy should not Mur- 
der fall behind Fright ? Or why should not all the three walk 
abreast ? We have read of a hero who had 

" Amazement in his van, with flight combined, 
And Sorrow's faded form, and Solitude behind." 

Gray, we suspect, could have given a reason for disposing the 
allegorical attendants of Edward thus. But to proceed, " Flower 
of Austria " is stolen from Byron. " Dropp'd " is false English. 
" Perish'd in the storm" means nothing at all; and "thy look 
obedience" means the very reverse of what Mr. Robert Mont- 
gomery intends to say. 

Our poet then proceeds to demonstrate the immortality of the 
soul : — 



76 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAU LAY 

" And shall the soul, the fount of reason, die, 
When dust and darkness round its temple lie? 
Did God breathe in it no ethereal fire, 
Dimless and quenchless, though the breath expire ? " 

The soul is a fountain; and therefore it is not to die, though 
dust and darkness lie round its temple, because an ethereal fire 
has been breathed into it, which cannot be quenched though its 
breath expire. Is it the fountain, or the temple, that breathes, 
and has fire breathed into it ? 

Mr. Montgomery apostrophizes the 

" Immortal beacons, — spirits of the just," — 

and describes their employments in another world, which are to 
be, it seems, bathing in light, hearing fiery streams flow, and 
riding on living cars of lightning. The death-bed of the sceptic 
is described with what we suppose is meant for energy. We 
then have the death-bed of a Christian made as ridiculous as 
false imagery and false English can make it. But this is not 
enough. The Day of Judgment is to be described, and a roar- 
ing cataract of nonsense is poured forth upon this tremendous 
subject. Earth, we are told, is dashed into Eternity. Furnace 
blazes wheel round the horizon, and burst into bright wizard 
phantoms. Racing hurricanes unroll and whirl quivering fire- 
clouds. The white waves gallop. Shadowy worlds career 
around. The red and raging eye of Imagination is then for- 
bidden to pry further. But further Mr. Robert Montgomery 
persists in prying. The stars bound through the airy roar. The 
unbosomed deep yawns on the ruin. The billows of Eternity 
then begin to advance. The world glares in fiery slumber. A 
car comes forward driven by living thunder, 

" Creation shudders with sublime dismay, 
And in a blazing tempest whirls away." 

And this is fine poetry ! This is what ranks its writer with the 
master-spirits of the age! This is what has been described, 
over and over again, in terms which would require some qualifica- 
tion if used respecting Paradise Lost! It is too much that this 
patchwork, made by stitching together old odds and ends of what, 
when new, was but tawdry frippery, is to be picked off the dung- 
hill on which it ought to rot, and to be held up to admiration as 
an inestimable specimen of art. And what must we think of a 



MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS 77 

system by means of which verses like those which we have quoted, 
verses fit only for the poet's corner of the Morning Post, can pro- 
duce emolument and fame? The circulation of this writer's 
poetry has been greater than that of Southey's Roderick, and 
beyond all comparison greater than that of Cary's Dante or of 
the best works of Coleridge. Thus encouraged, Mr. Robert 
Montgomery has favoured the public with volume after volume. 
We have given so much space to the examination of his first and 
most popular performance that we have none to spare for his 
Universal Prayer, and his smaller poems, which, as the puffing 
journals tell us, would alone constitute a sufficient title to literary 
immortality. We shall pass at once to his last publication, en- 
titled Satan. 

This poem was ushered into the world with the usual roar of 
acclamation. But the thing was now past a joke. Pretensions 
so unfounded, so impudent, and so successful, had aroused a 
spirit of resistance. In several magazines and reviews, accord- 
ingly, Satan has been handled somewhat roughly, and the arts 
of the puffers have been exposed with good sense and spirit. We 
shall, therefore, be very concise. 

Of the two poems we rather prefer that on the Omnipresence 
of the Deity, for the same reason which induced Sir Thomas More 
to rank one bad book above another. "Marry, this is somewhat. 
This is rhyme. But the other is neither rhyme nor reason." 
Satan is a long soliloquy, which the Devil pronounces in five or 
six thousand lines of bad blank verse, concerning geography, 
politics, newspapers, fashionable society, theatrical amusements, 
Sir Walter Scott's novels, Lord Byron's poetry, and Mr. Martin's 
pictures. The new designs for Milton have, as was natural, 
particularly attracted the attention of a personage who occupies 
so conspicuous a place in them. Mr. Martin must be pleased 
to learn that, whatever may be thought of those performances on 
earth, they give full satisfaction in Pandaemonium, and that he 
is there thought to have hit off the likenesses of the various Thrones 
and Dominations very happily. 

The motto to the poem of Satan is taken from the Book of Job : 
"Whence comest thou? From going to and fro in the earth, and 
walking up and down in it." And certainly Mr. Robert Mont- 
gomery has not failed to make his hero go to and fro, and walk 
up and down. With the exception, however, of this propensity 
to locomotion, Satan has not one Satanic quality. Mad Tom had 



78 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAU LAY 

told us that "the prince of darkness is a gentleman"; but we had 
yet to learn that he is a respectable and pious gentleman, whose 
principal fault is that he is something of a twaddle and far too 
liberal of his good advice. That happy change in his character 
which Origen anticipated, and of which Tillotson did not despair, 
seems to be rapidly taking place. Bad habits are not eradicated 
in a moment. It is not strange, therefore, that so old an offender 
should now and then relapse for a short time into w T rong disposi- 
tions. But to give him his due, as the proverb recommends, we 
must say that he always returns, after two or three lines of impiety, 
to his preaching style. We would seriously advise Mr. Mont- 
gomery to omit or alter about a hundred lines in different parts of 
this large volume, and to republish it under the name of Gabriel. 
The reflections of which it consists would come less absurdly, as 
far as there is a more and a less in extreme absurdity, from a good 
than from a bad angel. 

We can afford room only for a single quotation. We give one 
taken at random, neither worse nor better, as far as we can per- 
ceive, than any other equal number of lines in the book. The 
Devil goes to the play, and moralizes thereon as follows : — 

"Music and Pomp their mingling spirit shed 
Around me : beauties in their cloud-like robes 
Shine forth, — a scenic paradise, it glares 
Intoxication through the reeling sense 
Of flush'd enjoyment. In the motley host 
Three prime gradations may be rank'd : the first, 
To mount upon the wings of Shakespeare's mind, 
And win a flash of his Promethean thought, — ■ 
To smile and weep, to shudder, and achieve 
A round of passionate omnipotence, 
Attend : the second, are a sensual tribe, 
Convened to hear romantic harlots sing, 
On forms to banquet a lascivious gaze, 
While the bright perfidy of wanton eyes 
Through brain and spirit darts delicious fire: 
The last, a throng most pitiful ! who seem, 
With their corroded figures, rayless glance, 
And death-like struggle of decaying age, 
Like painted skeletons in charnel pomp 
Set forth to satirize the human kind ! — ■ 
How fine a prospect for demoniac view ! 
'Creatures whose souls outbalance worlds awake!' 
Methinks I hear a pitying angel cry." 

Here we conclude. If our remarks give pain to Mr. Robert 
Montgomery, we are sorry for it. But, at whatever cost of pain 



MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS 79 

to individuals, literature must be purified from this taint. And, 
to show that we are not actuated by any feeling of personal enmity 
towards him, we hereby give notice that, as soon as any book shall, 
by means of puffing, reach a second edition, our intention is to 
do unto the writer of it as we have done unto Mr. Robert Mont- 
gomery. 



V 

WALTER BAGEHOT 

(1826-1877) 

CHARLES DICKENS 1 

[First published in 1858. From Literary Studies, Volume 2] 

It must give Mr. Dickens much pleasure to look at the collected 
series of his writings. He has told us of the beginnings of Pick- 
wick. 

"I was," he relates in what is now the preface to that work, "a young man 
of three and twenty, when the present publishers, attracted by some pieces 
I was at that time writing in the Morning Chronicle newspaper (of which 
one series had lately been collected and published in two volumes, illustrated 
by my esteemed friend Mr. George Cruikshank), waited upon me to propose 
a something that should be published in shilling numbers — then only known 
to me, or I believe to anybody else, by a dim recollection of certain intermi- 
nable novels in that form, which used, some five and twenty years ago, to be 
carried about the country by pedlars, and over some of which I remember to 
have shed innumerable tears, before I served my apprenticeship to Life. 
When I opened my door in Furnival's Inn to the managing partner who rep- 
resented the firm, I recognized in him the person from whose hands I had 
bought, two or three years previously, and whom I had never seen before or 
since, my first copy of the magazine in which my first effusion — dropped 
stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter- 
box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street — appeared in all the 
glory of print ; on which occasion, by-the-bye, — how well I recollect it ! — ■ 
I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, be- 
cause my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear 
the street, and were not fit to be seen there. I told my visitor of the coinci- 
dence, which we both hailed as a good omen; and so fell to business." 

1 Cheap Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens. The Pickwick Papers, 
Nicholas Nickleby, etc. London, 1857-8. Chapman and Hall. 

80 



CHARLES DICKENS 8 1 

After such a beginning, there must be great enjoyment in look- 
ing at the long series of closely printed green volumes, in remem- 
bering their marvellous popularity, in knowing that they are a 
familiar literature wherever the English language is spoken, — 
that they are read with admiring appreciation by persons of the 
highest culture at the centre of civilization, — that they amuse, 
and are fit to amuse, the roughest settler in Vancouver's Island. 

The penetrating power of this remarkable genius among all 
classes at home is not inferior to its diffusive energy abroad. The 
phrase "household book" has, when applied to the works of 
Mr. Dickens, a peculiar propriety. There is no contemporary 
English writer, whose works are read so generally through the 
whole house, who can give pleasure to the servants as well as to 
the mistress, to the children as well as to the master. Mr. Thack- 
eray without doubt exercises a more potent and plastic fascination 
within his sphere, but that sphere is limited. It is restricted to 
that part of the middle class which gazes inquisitively at the 
"Vanity Fair" world. The delicate touches of our great satirist 
have, for such readers, not only the charm of wit, but likewise 
the interest of valuable information; he tells them of the topics 
which they want to know. But below this class there is another 
and far larger, which is incapable of comprehending the idling 
world, or of appreciating the accuracy of delineations drawn from 
it, — which would not know the difference between a picture of 
Grosvenor Square by Mr. Thackeray and the picture of it in a 
Minerva-Press novel, — which only cares for or knows of its 
own multifarious, industrial, fig-selling world, — and over these 
also Mr. Dickens has power. 

It cannot be amiss to take this opportunity of investigating, 
even slightly, the causes of so great a popularity. And if, in the 
course of our article, we may seem to be ready with over-refining 
criticism, or to be unduly captious with theoretical objections, 
we hope not to forget that so great and so diffused an influence 
is a datum for literary investigation, — that books which have 
been thus tried upon mankind and have thus succeeded, must be 
books of immense genius, — and that it is our duty as critics to 
explain, as far as we can, the nature and the limits of that genius, 
but never for one moment to deny or question its existence. 

Men of genius may be divided into regular and irregular. Cer- 
tain minds, the moment we think of them, suggest to us the ideas 
of symmetry and proportion. Plato's name, for example, calls 



82 WALTER BAGEHOT 

up at once the impression of something ordered, measured, and 
settled : it is the exact contrary of everything eccentric, immature, 
or undeveloped. The opinions of such a mind are often erroneous, 
and some of them may, from change of time, of intellectual data, 
or from chance, seem not to be quite worthy of it; but the mode 
in which those opinions are expressed, and (as far as we can make 
it out) the mode in which they are framed, affect us, as we have 
said, with a sensation of symmetricalness. It is not very easy to 
define exactly to what peculiar internal characteristic this external 
effect is due: the feeling is distinct, but the cause is obscure; it 
lies hid in the peculiar constitution of great minds, and we should 
not wonder that it is not very easy either to conceive or to describe. 
On the whole, however, the effect seems to be produced by a 
peculiar proportionateness, in each instance, of the mind to the 
tasks which it undertakes, amid which we see it, and by which 
we measure it. Thus we feel that the powers and tendencies of 
Plato's mind and nature were more fit than those of any other 
philosopher for the due consideration and exposition of the highest 
problems of philosophy, of the doubts and difficulties which con- 
cern man as man. His genius was adapted to its element; and 
change would mar the delicacy of the thought, or the polished 
accuracy of the expression. The weapon was fitted to its aim. 
Every instance of proportionateness does not, however, lead us 
to attribute this peculiar symmetry to the whole mind we are 
observing. The powers must not only be suited to the task under- 
taken, but the task itself must also be suited to a human being, 
and employ all the marvellous faculties with which he is endowed. 
The neat perfection of such a mind as Talleyrand's is the antith- 
esis to the symmetry of genius ; the niceties neither of diplomacy 
nor of conversation give scope to the entire powers of a great 
nature. We may lay down as the condition of a regular or sym- 
metrical genius, that it should have the exact combination of 
powers suited to graceful and easy success in an exercise of mind 
great enough to task the whole intellectual nature. 

On the other hand, men of irregular or unsymmetrical genius 
are eminent either for some one or some few peculiarities of mind, 
have possibly special defects on other sides of their intellectual 
nature, at any rate want what the scientific men of the present 
day would call the definite proportion of faculties and qualities 
suited to the exact work they have in hand. The foundation of 
many criticisms of Shakespeare is, that he is deficient in this 






CHARLES DICKENS 83 

peculiar proportion. His overteeming imagination gives at times, 
and not unfrequently, a great feeling of irregularity; there seems 
to be confusion. We have the tall trees of the forest, the majestic 
creations of the highest genius; but we have, besides, a bushy 
second growth, an obtrusion of secondary images and fancies, 
which prevent our taking an exact measure of such grandeur. We 
have not the sensation of intense simplicity, which must probably 
accompany the highest conceivable greatness. Such is also the 
basis of Mr. Hallam's criticism on Shakespeare's language, 1 
which Mr. Arnold has lately revived. 2 "His expression is often 
faulty," because his illustrative imagination, somewhat predomi- 
nating over his other faculties, diffuses about the main expression 
a supplement of minor metaphors which sometimes distract the 
comprehension, and almost always deprive his style of the charm 
that arises from undeviating directness. Doubtless this is an 
instance of the very highest kind of irregular genius, in which 
all the powers exist in the mind in a very high, and almost all of 
them in the very highest measure, but in which from a slight 
excess in a single one, the charm of proportion is lessened. The 
most ordinary cases of irregular genius are those in which single 
faculties are abnormally developed, and call off the attention from 
all the rest of the mind by their prominence and activity. Litera- 
ture, as the "fragment of fragments," is so full of the fragments 
of such minds that it is needless to specify instances. 

Possibly it may be laid down that one of two elements is essen- 
tial to a symmetrical mind. It is evident that such a mind must 
either apply itself to that which is theoretical or that which is 
practical, to the world of abstraction or to the world of objects 
and realities. In the former case the deductive understanding, 
which masters first principles, and makes deductions from them, 
the thin ether of the intellect, — the "mind itself by itself," — 
must evidently assume a great prominence. To attempt to com- 
prehend principles without it, is to try to swim without arms, or 
to fly without wings. Accordingly, in the mind of Plato, and in 
others like him, the abstract and deducing understanding fills 
a great place; the imagination seems a kind of eye to descry its 
data; the artistic instinct an arranging impulse, which sets in 
order its inferences and conclusions. On the other hand, if a 
symmetrical mind busy itself with the active side of human life, 

1 Introduction to the Literature of Europe, Vol. II, Chapter VI. 

2 Preface to Matthew Arnold's Poems. 



84 WALTER BAGEHOT 

with the world of concrete men and real things, its principal quality 
will be a practical sagacity, which forms with ease a distinct view 
and just appreciation of all the mingled objects that the world 
presents, — which allots to each its own place, and its intrinsic 
and appropriate rank. Possibly no mind gives such an idea of 
this sort of symmetry as Chaucer's. Everything in it seems in its 
place. A healthy sagacious man of the world has gone through 
the world; he loves it, and knows it; he dwells on it with fond 
appreciation; every object of the old life of "merry England" 
seems to fall into its precise niche in his ordered and symmetrical 
comprehension. The prologue to the Canterbury Tales is in 
itself a series of memorial tablets to mediaeval society ; each class 
has its tomb, and each its apt inscription. A man without such an 
apprehensive and broad sagacity must fail in every extensive 
delineation of various life ; he might attempt to describe what he 
did not penetrate, or if by a rare discretion he avoided that mis- 
take, his works would want the binding element; he would be 
deficient in that distinct sense of relation and combination which 
is necessary for the depiction of the whole of life, which gives to it 
unity at first, and imparts to it a mass in the memory ever after- 
wards. And eminence in one or other of these marking facul- 
ties — either in the deductive abstract intellect, or the practical 
seeing sagacity — seems essential to the mental constitution of a 
symmetrical genius, at least in man. There are, after all, but 
two principal all-important spheres in human life — thought 
and action; and we can hardly conceive of a masculine mind 
symmetrically developed, which did not evince its symmetry by 
an evident perfection in one or other of those pursuits, which did 
not leave the trace of its distinct reflection upon the one, or of 
its large insight upon the other of them. Possibly it may be 
thought that in the sphere of pure art there may be room for a 
symmetrical development different from these; but it will perhaps 
be found, on examination of such cases, either that under peculiar 
and appropriate disguises one of these great qualities is present, 
or that the apparent symmetry is the narrow perfection of a 
limited nature, which may be most excellent in itself, as in the 
stricter form of sacred art, but which, as we explained, is quite 
opposed to that broad perfection of the thinking being, to which 
we have applied the name of the symmetry of genius. 

If this classification of men of genius be admitted, there can be no 
hesitation in assigning to Mr. Dickens his place in it. His genius 



CHARLES DICKENS 85 

is essentially irregular and unsymmetrical. Hardly any English 
writer perhaps is much more so. His style is an example of it. 
It is descriptive, racy, and flowing; it is instinct with new imagery 
and singular illustration; but it does not indicate that due pro- 
portion of the faculties to one another which is a beauty in itself, 
and which cannot help diffusing beauty over every happy word 
and moulded clause. We may choose an illustration at random. 
The following graphic description will do : — 

" If Lord George Gordon had appeared in the eyes of Mr. Wilier, over- 
night, a nobleman of somewhat quaint and odd exterior, the impression was 
confirmed this morning, and increased a hundred-fold. Sitting bolt upright 
upon his bony steed, with his long, straight hair dangling about his face and 
fluttering in the wind ; his limbs all angular and rigid, his elbows stuck out 
on either side ungracefully, and his whole frame jogged and shaken at 
every motion of his horse's feet; a more grotesque or more ungainly figure 
can hardly be conceived. In lieu of whip, he carried in his hand a great gold- 
headed cane, as large as any footman carries in these days; and his various 
modes of holding this unwieldy weapon — now upright before his face like 
the sabre of a horse-soldier, now over his shoulder like a musket, now between 
his finger and thumb, but always in some uncouth and awkward fashion — 
contributed in no small degree to the absurdity of his appearance. Stiff, 
lank, and solemn, dressed in an unusual manner, and ostentatiously exhibit- 
ing — whether by design or accident — all his peculiarities of carriage, 
gesture, and conduct, all the qualities, natural and artificial, in which he 
differed from other men, he might have moved the sternest looker-on to laugh- 
ter, and fully provoked the smiles and whispered jests which greeted his de- 
parture from the Maypole Inn. 

"Quite unconscious, however, of the effect he produced, he trotted on be- 
side his secretary, talking to himself nearly all the way, until they came within 
a mile or two of London, when now and then some passenger went by who 
knew him by sight, and pointed him out to some one else, and perhaps stood 
looking after him, or cried in jest or earnest as it might be, ' Hurrah, Geordie ! 
No Popery ! ' At which he would gravely pull off his hat and bow. When 
they reached the town and rode along the streets, these notices became more 
frequent; some laughed, some hissed, some turned their heads and smiled, 
some wondered who he was, some ran along the pavement by his side and 
cheered. When this happened in a crush of carts and chairs and coaches, he 
would make a dead stop, and pulling off his hat, cry, ' Gentlemen, No Pop- 
ery ! ' to which the gentlemen would respond with lusty voices, and with 
three times three; and then on he would go again with a score or so of the 
raggedest following at his horse's heels, and shouting till their throats were 
parched. 

"The old ladies too — there were a great many old ladies in the streets, 
and these all knew him. Some of them — not those of the highest rank, 
but such as sold fruit from baskets and carried burdens — clapped their 
shrivelled hands, and raised a weazen, piping, shrill 'Hurrah, my lord.' 
Others waved their hands or handkerchiefs, or shook their fans or parasols, 
or threw up windows, and called in haste to those within to come and see. 



86 WALTER BAGEHOT 

All these marks of popular esteem he received with profound gravity and 
respect; bowing very low, and so frequently that his hat was more off his head 
than on ; and looking up at the houses as he passed along, with the air of one 
who was making a public entry, and yet was not puffed-up or proud." l 

No one would think of citing such a passage as this, as exempli- 
fying the proportioned beauty of finished writing; it is not the 
writing of an evenly developed or of a highly cultured mind; it 
abounds in jolts and odd turns; it is full of singular twists and 
needless complexities: but, on the other hand, no one can deny 
its great and peculiar merit. It is an odd style, and it is very odd 
how much you read it. It is the overflow of a copious mind, 
though not the chastened expression of a harmonious one. 

The same quality characterizes the matter of his works. His 
range is very varied. He has attempted to describe every kind 
of scene in English life, from quite the lowest to almost the highest. 
He has not endeavoured to secure success by confining himself 
to a single path, nor wearied the public with repetitions of the 
subjects by the delineation of which he originally obtained fame. 
In his earlier works he never writes long without saying something 
well; something which no other man would have said; but even 
in them it is the characteristic of his power that it is apt to fail 
him at once; from masterly strength we pass without interval to 
almost infantine weakness, — something like disgust succeeds in 
a moment to an extreme admiration. Such is the natural fate of 
an unequal mind employing itself on a vast and variegated sub- 
ject. In writing on the Waverley Novels, we ventured to make 
a division of novels into the ubiquitous — it would have been 
perhaps better to say the miscellaneous — and the sentimental : 
the first, as its name implies, busying itself with the whole of 
human life, the second restricting itself within a peculiar and 
limited theme. Mr. Dickens's novels are all of the former class. 
They aim to delineate nearly all that part of our national life 
which can be delineated, — at least, within the limits which social 
morality prescribes to social art ; but you cannot read his deline- 
ation of any part without being struck with its singular incom- 
pleteness. An artist once said of the best work of another artist : 
" Yes, it is a pretty patch." If we might venture on the phrase, 
we should say that Mr. Dickens's pictures are graphic scraps; 
his best books are compilations of them. 

The truth is, that Mr. Dickens wholly wants the two elements 

1 Barnaby Rudge, Chapter XXXVII. 



CHARLES DICKENS 8 J 

which we have spoken of, as one or other requisite for a symmet- 
rical genius. He is utterly deficient in the faculty of reasoning. 
"Mamma, what shall I think about?" said the small girl. "My 
dear, don't think," was the old-fashioned reply. We do not 
allege that in the strict theory of education this was a correct reply ; 
modern writers think otherwise; but we wish some one would 
say it to Mr. Dickens. He is often troubled with the idea that he 
must reflect, and his reflections are perhaps the worst reading 
in the world. There is a sentimental confusion about them; we 
never find the consecutive precision of mature theory, or the cold 
distinctness of clear thought. Vivid facts stand out in his imagi- 
nation; and a fresh illustrative style brings them home to the 
imagination of his readers ; but his continuous philosophy utterly 
fails in the attempt to harmonize them, — to educe a theory or 
elaborate a precept from them. Of his social thinking we shall 
have a few words to say in detail; his didactic humour is very 
unfortunate : no writer is less fitted for an excursion to the impera- 
tive mood. At present, we only say, what is so obvious as scarcely 
to need saying, that his abstract understanding is so far inferior 
to his picturesque imagination as to give even to his best works 
the sense of jar and incompleteness, and to deprive them alto- 
gether of the crystalline finish which is characteristic of the clear 
and cultured understanding. 

Nor has Mr. Dickens the easy and various sagacity which, as 
has been said, gives a unity to all which it touches. He has, 
indeed, a quality which is near allied to it in appearance. His 
shrewdness in some things, especially in traits and small things, 
is wonderful. His works are full of acute remarks on petty doings, 
and well exemplify the telling power of minute circumstantiality. 
But the minor species of perceptive sharpness is so different from 
diffused sagacity, that the two scarcely ever are to be found in 
the same mind. There is nothing less like the great lawyer, 
acquainted with broad principles and applying them with dis- 
tinct deduction, than the attorney's clerk who catches at small 
points like a dog biting at flies. " Over-sharpness" in the student 
is the most unpromising symptom of the logical jurist. You must 
not ask a horse in blinkers for a large view of a landscape. In the 
same way, a detective ingenuity in microscopic detail is of all 
mental qualities most unlike the broad sagacity by which the 
great painters of human affairs have unintentionally stamped 
the mark of unity on their productions. They show by their 



88 WALTER BAGEHOT 

treatment of each case that they understand the whole of life; 
the special delineator of fragments and points shows that he 
understands them only. In one respect the defect is more striking 
in Mr. Dickens than in any other novelist of the present day. The 
most remarkable deficiency in modern fiction is its omission of 
the business of life, of all those countless occupations, pursuits, 
and callings in which most men live and move, and by which they 
have their being. In most novels money grows. You have no 
idea of the toil, the patience, and the wearing anxiety by which 
men of action provide for the day, and lay up for the future, and 
support those that are given into their care. Mr. Dickens is not 
chargeable with this omission. He perpetually deals with the 
pecuniary part of life. Almost all his characters have deter- 
mined occupations, of which he is apt to talk even at too much 
length. When he rises from the toiling to the luxurious classes, 
his genius in most cases deserts him. The delicate refinement 
and discriminating taste of the idling orders are not in his way; 
he knows the dry arches of London Bridge better than Belgravia. 
He excels in inventories of poor furniture, and is learned in pawn- 
brokers' tickets. But, although his creative power lives and 
works among the middle class and industrial section of English 
society, he has never painted the highest part of their daily intel- 
lectual life. He made, indeed, an attempt to paint specimens of 
the apt and able man of business in Nicholas Nickleby; but the 
Messrs. Cheeryble are among the stupidest of his characters. 
He forgot that breadth of platitude is rather different from breadth 
of sagacity. His delineations of middle-class life have in conse- 
quence a harshness and meanness which do not belong to that 
life in reality. He omits the relieving element. He describes 
the figs which are sold, but not the talent which sells figs well. 
And it is the same want of diffused sagacity in his own nature 
which has made his pictures of life so odd and disjointed, and 
which has deprived them of symmetry and unity. 

The bizarrerie of Mr. Dickens's genius is rendered more re- 
markable by the inordinate measure of his special excellences. 
The first of these is his power of observation in detail. We have 
heard, — we do not know whether correctly or incorrectly, — 
that he can go down a crowded street, and tell you all that is in 
it, what each shop was, what the grocer's name was, how many 
scraps of orange-peel there were on the pavement. His works 
give you exactly the same idea. The amount of detail which 



CHARLES DICKENS 89 

there is in them is something amazing, — to an ordinary writer 
something incredible. There are single pages containing telling 
minuticB, which other people would have thought enough for a 
volume. Nor is his sensibility to external objects, though omnivo- 
rous, insensible to the artistic effect of each. There are scarcely 
anywhere such pictures of London as he draws. No writer has 
equally comprehended the artistic material which is given by 
its extent, its aggregation of different elements, its mouldiness, 
its brilliancy. 

Nor does his genius — though, from some idiosyncrasy of 
mind or accident of external situation, it is more especially 
directed to city life — at all stop at the city wall. He is especially 
at home in the picturesque and obvious parts of country life, 
particularly in the comfortable and (so to say) mouldering portion 
of it. The following is an instance; if not the best that could 
be cited, still one of the best : — 

"They arranged to proceed upon their journey next evening, as a stage- 
waggon, which travelled for some distance on the same road as they must take, 
would stop at the inn to change horses, and the driver for a small gratuity 
would give Nell a place inside. A bargain was soon struck when the waggon 
came; and in due time it rolled away; with the child comfortably bestowed 
among the softer packages, her grandfather and the schoolmaster walking 
on beside the driver, and the landlady and all the good folks of the inn 
screaming out their good wishes and farewells. 

"What a soothing, luxurious, drowsy way of travelling, to lie inside that 
slowly-moving mountain, listening to the tinkling of the horses' bells, the 
occasional smacking of the carter's whip, the smooth rolling of the great broad 
wheels, the rattle of the harness, the cheery good-nights of passing travellers 
jogging past on little short-stepped horses — all made pleasantly indistinct 
by the thick awning, which seemed made for lazy listening under, till one fell 
asleep ! The very going to sleep, still with an indistinct idea, as the head 
jogged to and fro upon the pillow, of moving onward with no trouble or fatigue, 
and hearing all these sounds like dreamy music, lulling to the senses — and 
the slow waking up, and finding one's self staring out through the breezy 
curtain half-opened in the front, far up into the cold bright sky with its 
countless stars, and downwards at the driver's lantern dancing on like its 
namesake Jack of the swamps and marshes, and sideways at the dark grim 
trees, and forward at the long bare road rising up, up, up, until it stopped 
abruptly at a sharp high ridge as if there were no more road, and all beyond 
was sky — and the stopping at the inn to bait, and being helped out, and going 
into a room with fire and candles, and winking very much, and being agree- 
ably reminded that the night was cold, and anxious for very comfort's sake 
to think it colder than it was ! What a delicious journey was that journey 
in the waggon ! 

" Then the going on again — so fresh at first, and shortly afterwards so 
sleepy. The waking from a sound nap as the mail came dashing past like a 



go WALTER BAGEHOT 

highway comet, with gleaming lamps and rattling hoofs, and visions of a 
guard behind, standing up to keep his feet warm, and of a gentleman in a 
fur cap opening his eyes and looking wild and stupefied — the stopping at 
the turnpike, where the man has gone to bed, and knocking at the door 
until he answered with a smothered shout from under the bed-clothes in the 
little room above, where the faint light was burning, and presently came down, 
night-capped and shivering, to throw the gate wide open, and wish all wag- 
gons off the road except by day. The cold sharp interval between night and 
morning — the distant streak of light widening and spreading, and turning 
from grey to white, and from white to yellow, and from yellow to burning red 

— the presence of day, with all its cheerfulness and life — men and horses at 
the plough — birds in the trees and hedges, and boys in solitary fields frighten- 
ing them away with rattles. The coming to a town — people busy in the 
market; light carts and chaises round the tavern yard; tradesmen standing 
at their doors; men running horses up and down the street for sale; pigs 
plunging and grunting in the dirty distance, getting off with long strings at 
their legs, running into clean chemists' shops and being dislodged with brooms 
by 'prentices; the night-coach changing horses — the passengers cheerless, 
Cold, ugly, and discontented, with three months' growth of hair in one night 

— the coachman fresh as from a bandbox, and exquisitely beautiful by con- 
trast : — so much bustle, so many things in motion, such a variety of incidents 

— when was there a journey with so many delights as that journey in the 
waggon!" l 

Or, as a relief from a very painful series of accompanying 
characters, it is pleasant to read and remember the description 
of the fine morning on which Mr. Jonas Chuzzlewit does not reflect. 
Mr. Dickens has, however, no feeling analogous to the nature- 
worship of some other recent writers. There is nothing Words- 
worthian in his bent; the interpreting inspiration (as that school 
speak) is not his. Nor has he the erudition in difficult names 
which has filled some pages in late novelists with mineralogy 
and botany. His descriptions of Nature are fresh and superficial ; 
they are not sermonic or scientific. 

Nevertheless, it may be said that Mr. Dickens's genius is espe- 
cially suited to the delineation of city life. London is like a news- 
paper. Everything is there, and everything is disconnected. 
There is every kind of person in some nouses; but there is no 
more connection between the houses than between the neighbours 
in the lists of " births, marriages, and deaths." As we change 
from the broad leader to the squalid police report, we pass a 
corner and we are in a changed world. This is advantageous to 
Mr. Dickens's genius. His memory is full of instances of old 
buildings and curious people, and he does not care to piece them 

1 Old Curiosity Shop, Chapter XL VI. 



CHARLES DICKENS 91 

together. On the contrary, each scene, to his mind, is a separate 
scene, — each street a separate street. He has, too, the peculiar 
alertness of observation that is observable in those who live by it. 
He describes London like a special correspondent for posterity. 

A second most wonderful special faculty which Mr. Dickens 
possesses is what we may call his vivification of character, or 
rather of characteristics. His marvellous power of observation 
has been exercised upon men and women even more than upon 
town or country; and the store of human detail, so to speak, in 
his books is endless and enormous. The boots at the inn, the 
pickpockets in the street, the undertaker, the Mrs. Gamp, are 
all of them at his disposal; he knows each trait and incident, 
and he invests them with a kind of perfection in detail which in 
reality they do not possess. He has a very peculiar power of 
taking hold of some particular traits, and making a character 
out of them. He is especially apt to incarnate particular pro- 
fessions in this way. Many of his people never speak without 
some allusion to their occupation. You cannot separate them 
from it. Nor does the writer ever separate them. What would 
Mr. Mould l be if not an undertaker ? or Mrs. Gamp 2 if not a 
nurse ? or Charley Bates 3 if not a pickpocket ? Not only is 
human nature in them subdued to what it works in, but there 
seems to be no nature to subdue; the whole character is the 
idealization of a trade, and is not in fancy or thought distinguish- 
able from it. Accordingly, of necessity, such delineations become 
caricatures. We do not in general contrast them with reality; 
but as soon as we do, we are struck with the monstrous exaggera- 
tions which they present. You could no more fancy Sam Weller, 
or Mark Tapley, or the Artful Dodger 4 really existing, walking 
about among common ordinary men and women, than you can 
fancy a talking duck or a writing bear. They are utterly beyond 
the pale of ordinary social intercourse. We suspect, indeed, that 
Mr. Dickens does not conceive his characters to himself as mixing 
in the society he mixes in. He sees people in the street, doing cer- 
tain things, talking in a certain way, and his fancy petrifies them 
in the act. He goes on fancying hundreds of reduplications of 
that act and that speech; he frames an existence in which there 
is nothing else but that aspect which attracted his attention. 
Sam Weller is an example. He is a man-servant, who makes a 

1 In Martin Chuzzlewit. 2 Ibid. 3 In Oliver Twist. 

4 In the Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Oliver Twist. 



92 WALTER BAGEHOT 

peculiar kind of jokes, and is wonderfully felicitous in certain 
similes. You see him at his first introduction : — 

" 'My friend,' said the thin gentleman. 

"'You're one o' the adwice gratis order,' thought Sam, 'or you wouldn't 
be so werry fond o' me all at once.' But he only said — 'Well, sir?' 

"'My friend,' said the thin gentleman, with a conciliatory hem — 'have 
you got many people stopping here, now? Pretty busy? Eh?' 

"Sam stole a look at the inquirer. He was a little high-dried man, with 
a dark squeezed-up face, and small restless black eyes, that kept winking and 
twinkling on each side of his little inquisitive nose, as if they were playing 
a perpetual game of peep-bo with that feature. He was dressed all in black, 
with boots as shiny as his eyes, a low white neckcloth, and a clean shirt with 
a frill to it. A gold watch-chain and seals depended from his fob. He car- 
ried his black kid gloves in his hands, not on them; and, as he spoke, thrust 
his wrists beneath his coat-tails, with the air of a man who was in the habit of 
propounding some regular posers. 

"'Pretty busy, eh?' said the little man. 

"'Oh, werry well, sir,' replied Sam, 'we shan't be bankrupts, and we 
shan't make our fort'ns. We eat our biled mutton without capers, and don't 
care for horse-radish wen ve can get beef.' 

"'Ah,' said the little man, 'you're a wag, ain't you?' 

'"My eldest brother was troubled with that complaint,' said Sam, 'it 
may be catching — I used to sleep with him.' 

"'This is a curious old house of yours,' said the little man, looking round 
him. 

"'If you'd sent word you was a-coming, we'd ha' had it repaired,' replied 
the imperturbable Sam. 

"The little man seemed rather baffled by these several repulses, and a 
short consultation took place between him and the two plump gentlemen. 
At its conclusion, the little man took a pinch of snuff from an oblong silver 
box, and was apparently on the point of renewing the conversation, when one 
of the plump gentlemen, who, in addition to a benevolent countenance, pos- 
sessed a pair of spectacles and a pair of black gaiters, interfered — 

"'The fact of the matter is,' said the benevolent gentleman, 'that my friend 
here ' (pointing to the other plump gentleman) ' will give you half a guinea, if 
you'll answer one or two ' 

"'Now, my dear sir — my dear sir,' said the little man, 'pray allow me — 
my dear sir, the very first principle to be observed in these cases is this: if 
you place a matter in the hands of a professional man, you must in no way 
interfere in the progress of the business; you must repose implicit confidence 
in him. Really, Mr.' (he turned to the other plump gentleman, and said) — ■ 
'I forget your friend's name.' 

"'Pickwick,' said Mr. Wardle, for it was no other than that jolly person- 
age. 

"'Ah, Pickwick — really Mr. Pickwick, my dear sir, excuse me — I 
shall be happy to receive any private suggestions of yours, as amicus curies, 
but you must see the impropriety of your interfering with my conduct in this 
case, with such an ad captandum argument as the offer of half a guinea. 
Really, my dear sir, really,' and the little man took an argumentative pinch of 
snuff, and looked very profound. 



CHARLES DICKENS 93 

"'My only wish, sir,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'was to bring this very unpleas- 
ant matter to as speedy a close as possible.' 

"'Quite right — quite right,' said the little man. 

"'With which view,' continued Mr. Pickwick, 'I made use of the argu- 
ment which my experience of men has taught me is the most likely to succeed 
in any case.' 

"'Ay, ay,' said the little man, 'very good, very good indeed; but you 
should have suggested it to me. My dear sir, I'm quite certain you cannot be 
ignorant of the extent of confidence which must be placed in professional men. 
If any authority can be necessary on such a point, my dear sir, let me refer you 
to the well-known case in Barnwell and ' 

"'Never mind George Barnwell,' interrupted Sam, who had remained a 
wondering listener during this short colloquy; 'everybody knows vat sort of 
a case his was, tho' it's always been my opinion, mind you, that the young 
'ooman deserved scragging a precious sight more than he did. Hows'ever, 
that's neither here nor there. You want me to except of half a guinea. 
Werry well, I'm agreeable : I can't say no fairer than that, can I, sir?' (Mr. 
Pickwick smiled.) 'Then the next question is, what the devil do you want 
with me? as the man said wen he see the ghost.' 

"'We want to know ' said Mr. Wardle. 

"'Now, my dear sir — my dear sir,' interposed the busy little man. 

"Mr. Wardle shrugged his shoulders and was silent. 

"'We want to know,' said the little man solemnly; 'and we ask the ques- 
tion of you, in order that we may not awaken apprehensions inside — we want 
to know who you've got in this house at present.' 

" ' Who there is in the house !" said Sam, in whose mind the inmates were 
always represented by that particular article of their costume which came un- 
der his immediate superintendence. 'There's a wooden leg in number six; 
there's a pair of Hessians in thirteen; there's two pair of halves in the com- 
mercial; there's these here painted tops in the snuggery inside the bar; and 
five more tops in the coffee-room.' 

"'Nothing more?' said the little man. 

"'Stop a bit,' replied Sarn, suddenly recollecting himself. 'Yes; there's 
a pair of Wellingtons a good deal worn, and a pair o' lady's shoes, in number 
five.' 

'"What sort of shoes?' hastily inquired Wardle, who, together with Mr. 
Pickwick, had been lost in bewilderment at the singular catalogue of visitors. 

"'Country make,' replied Sam. 

"'Any maker's name?' 

"'Brown.' 

'"Where of?' 

"'Muggleton.' 

"'It is them,' exclaimed Wardle. 'By Heavens, we've found them.' 

"'Hush!' said Sam. 'The Wellingtons has gone to Doctors Commons.' 

"'No,' said the little man. 

'"Yes, for a license.' 

'"We're in time,' exclaimed Wardle. 'Show us the room; not a moment 
is to be lost.' 

'"Pray, my dear sir — pray,' said the little man; 'caution, caution' 
He drew from his pocket a red silk purse, and looked very hard at Sam as he 
drew out a sovereign. 



94 WALTER BAGEHOT 

"Sam grinned expressively. 

'"Show us into the room at once, without announcing us,' said the little 
man, 'and it's yours.'" 1 

One can fancy Mr. Dickens hearing a dialogue of this sort, — ■ 
not nearly so good, but something like it, — and immediately setting 
to work to make it better and put it in a book ; then changing a 
little the situation, putting the boots one step up in the scale of 
service, engaging him as footman to a stout gentleman (but without 
for a moment losing sight of the peculiar kind of professional 
conversation and humour which his first dialogue presents), and 
astonishing all his readers by the marvellous fertility and magical 
humour with which he maintains that style. Sam Weller's father 
is even a stronger and simpler instance. He is simply nothing 
but an old coachman of the stout and extinct sort : you cannot 
separate him from the idea of that occupation. But how amusing 
he is ! We dare not quote a single word of his talk ; because we 
should go on quoting so long, and every one knows it so well. Some 
persons may think that this is not a very high species of delineative 
art. The idea of personifying traits and trades may seem to them 
poor and meagre. Anybody, they may fancy, can do that. But 
how would they do it? Whose fancy would not break down in 
a page — in five lines ? Who can carry on the vivification with 
zest and energy and humour for volume after volume? Endless 
fertility in laughter-causing detail is Mr. Dickens's most aston- 
ishing peculiarity. It requires a continuous and careful reading 
of his works to be aware of his enormous wealth. Writers have 
attained the greatest reputation for wit and humour, whose whole 
works do not contain so much of either as are to be found in a very 
few pages of his. 

Mr. Dickens's humour is indeed very much a result of the two 
peculiarities of which we have been speaking. His power of 
detailed observation and his power of idealizing individual traits 
of character — sometimes of one or other of them, sometimes of 
both of them together. His similes on matters of external obser- 
vation are so admirable that everybody appreciates them, and 
it would be absurd to quote specimens of them; nor is it the sort 
of excellence which best bears to be paraded for the purposes of 
critical example. Its off-hand air and natural connection with 
the adjacent circumstances are inherent parts of its peculiar merit. 

1 Pickwick Papers, Chapter IX. 



CHARLES DICKENS 95 

Every reader of Mr. Dickens's works knows well what we mean. 
And who is not a reader of them ? 

But his peculiar humour is even more indebted to his habit of 
vivifying external traits, than to his power of external observation. 
He, as we have explained, expands traits into people; and it is 
a source of true humour to place these, when so expanded, in 
circumstances in which only people — that is complete human 
beings — can appropriately act. The humour of Mr. Pickwick's 
character is entirely of this kind. He is a kind of incarnation of 
simple-mindedness and what we may call obvious-mindedness. 
The conclusion which each occurrence or position in life most 
immediately presents to the unsophisticated mind is that which 
Mr. Pickwick is sure to accept. The proper accompaniments 
are given to him. He is a stout gentleman in easy circumstances, 
who is irritated into originality by no impulse from within, and 
by no stimulus from without. He is stated to have "retired from 
business." But no one can fancy what he was in business. Such 
guileless simplicity of heart and easy impressibility of disposition 
would soon have induced a painful failure amid the harsh struggles 
and the tempting speculations of pecuniary life. As he is repre- 
sented in the narrative, however, nobody dreams of such ante- 
cedents. Mr. Pickwick moves easily over all the surface of Eng- 
lish life from Goswell Street to Dingley Dell, from Dingley Dell 
to the Ipswich elections, from drinking milk-punch in a wheel- 
barrow to sleeping in the approximate pound, and no one ever 
thinks of applying to him the ordinary maxims which we should 
apply to any common person in life, or to any common personage 
in a fiction. Nobody thinks it is wrong in Mr. Pickwick to drink 
too much milk-punch in a wheelbarrow, to introduce worthless 
people of whom he knows nothing to the families of people for 
whom he really cares ; nobody holds him responsible for the con- 
sequences; nobody thinks there is anything wrong in his taking 
Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Benjamin Allen to visit Mr. Winkle, 
senior, and thereby almost irretrievably offending him with his 
son's marriage. We do not reject moral remarks such as these, 
but they never occur to us. Indeed, the indistinct consciousness 
that such observations are possible, and that they are hovering 
about our minds, enhances the humour of the narrative. We 
are in a conventional world, where the mere maxims of common 
life do not apply, and yet which has all the amusing detail, and 
picturesque elements, and singular eccentricities of common 



% WALTER BAGEHOT 

life. Mr. Pickwick is a personified ideal; a kind of amateur in 
life, whose course we watch through all the circumstances of ordi- 
nary existence, and at whose follies we are amused just as really 
skilled people are at the mistakes of an amateur in their art. His 
being in the pound is not wrong; his being the victim of Messrs. 
Dodson is not foolish. "Always shout with the mob," said Mr. 
Pickwick. " But suppose there are two mobs," said Mr. Snodgrass. 
"Then shout with the loudest," said Mr. Pickwick. This is not 
in him weakness or time-serving, or want of principle, as in most 
even of fictitious people it would be. It is his way. Mr. Pick- 
wick was expected to say something, so he said "Ah !" in a grave 
voice. This is not pompous as we might fancy, or clever as it 
might be, if intentionally devised; it is simply his way. Mr. 
Pickwick gets late at night over the wall behind the back-door of 
a young-ladies' school, is found in that sequestered place by the 
schoolmistress and the boarders and the cook, and there is a 
dialogue between them. 1 There is nothing out of possibility in 
this; it is his way. The humour essentially consists in treating 
as a moral agent a being who really is not a moral agent. We 
treat a vivified accident as a man, and we are surprised at the 
absurd results. We are reading about an acting thing, and we 
wonder at its scrapes, and laugh at them as if they were those of 
the man. There is something of this humour in every sort of 
farce. Everybody knows these are not real beings acting in real 
life, though they talk as if they were, and want us to believe that 
they are. Here, as in Mr. Dickens's books, we have exaggerations 
pretending to comport themselves as ordinary beings, caricatures 
acting as if they were characters. 

At the same time it is essential to remember, that however great 
may be and is the charm of such exaggerated personifications, 
the best specimens of them are immensely less excellent, belong to 
an altogether lower range of intellectual achievements, than the real 
depiction of actual living men. It is amusing to read of beings 
out of the laws of morality, but it is more profoundly interesting, 
as well as more instructive, to read of those whose life in its moral 
conditions resembles our own. We see this most distinctly when 
both representations are given by the genius of one and the same 
writer. Falstaff is a sort of sack-holding paunch, an exaggerated 
overdevelopment which no one thinks of holding down to the 
commonplace rules of the ten commandments and the statute- 

1 Chapter XVI. 



CHARLES DICKENS 97 

law. We do not think of them in connection with him. They 
belong to a world apart. Accordingly, we are vexed when the 
king discards him and reproves him. Such a fate was a necessary 
adherence on Shakespeare's part to the historical tradition; he 
never probably thought of departing from it, nor would his audi- 
ence have perhaps endured his doing so. But to those who look 
at the historical plays as pure works of imaginative art, it seems 
certainly an artistic misconception to have developed so mar- 
vellous an zmmoral impersonation, and then to have subjected 
it to an ethical and punitive judgment. Still, notwithstanding 
this error, which was very likely inevitable, Falstaff is probably 
the most remarkable specimen of caricature-representation to 
be found in literature. And its very excellence of execution only 
shows how inferior is the kind of art which creates only such 
representations. Who could compare the genius, marvellous 
as must be its fertility, which was needful to create a Falstaff, 
with that shown in the higher productions of the same mind in 
Hamlet, Ophelia, and Lear? We feel instantaneously the differ- 
ence between the aggregating accident which rakes up from the 
externalities of life other accidents analogous to itself, and the 
central ideal of a real character which cannot show itself wholly 
in any accidents, but which exemplifies itself partially in many, 
which unfolds itself gradually in wide spheres of action, and yet, 
as with those we know best in life, leaves something hardly to be 
understood, and after years of familiarity is a problem and a 
difficulty to the last. In the same way, the embodied character- 
istics and grotesque exaggerations of Mr. Dickens, notwithstanding 
all their humour and all their marvellous abundance, can never 
be for a moment compared with the great works of the real painters 
of essential human nature. 

There is one class of Mr. Dickens's pictures which may seem 
to form an exception to this criticism. It is the delineation of 
the outlaw, we might say the anti-law, world in Oliver Twist. 
In one or two instances Mr. Dickens has been so fortunate as to 
hit on characteristics which, by his system of idealization and con- 
tinual repetition, might really be brought to look like a character. 
A man's trade or profession in regular life can only exhaust a 
very small portion of his nature; no approach is made to the 
essence of humanity by the exaggeration of the traits which typify 
a beadle or an undertaker. With the outlaw world it is somewhat 
different. The bare fact of a man belonging to the world is so 

H 



98 WALTER BAGEHOT 

important to his nature, that if it is artistically developed with 
coherent accessories, some approximation to a distinctly natural 
character will be almost inevitably made. In the characters of 
Bill Sykes and Nancy this is so. The former is the skulking 
ruffian who may be seen any day at the police-courts, and whom 
any one may fancy he sees by walking through St. Giles's. You 
cannot attempt to figure to your imagination the existence of such 
a person without being thrown into the region of the passions, 
the will, and the conscience; the mere fact of his maintaining, 
as a condition of life and by settled profession, a struggle with 
regular society, necessarily brings these deep parts of his nature 
into prominence; great crime usually proceeds from abnormal 
impulses or strange effort. Accordingly, Mr. Sykes is the char- 
acter most approaching to a coherent man who is to be found in 
Mr. Dickens's works. We do not say that even here there is not 
some undue heightening admixture of caricature, — but this 
defect is scarcely thought of amid the general coherence of the 
picture, the painful subject, and the wonderful command of 
strange accessories. Miss Nancy is a still more delicate artistic 
effort. She is an idealization of the girl who may also be seen at 
the police-courts and St. Giles's; as bad, according to occupation 
and common character, as a woman can be, yet retaining a tinge 
of womanhood, and a certain compassion for interesting suffering, 
which under favouring circumstances might be the germ of a 
regenerating influence. We need not stay to prove how much 
the imaginative development of such a personage must concern 
itself with our deeper humanity; how strongly, if excellent, it 
must be contrasted with everything conventional or casual or 
superficial. Mr. Dickens's delineation is in the highest degree 
excellent. It possesses not only the more obvious merits belonging 
to the subject, but also that of a singular delicacy of expression 
and idea. Nobody fancies for a moment that they are reading 
about anything beyond the pale of ordinary propriety. We read 
the account of the life which Miss Nancy leads with Bill Sykes 
without such an idea occurring to us: yet when we reflect upon 
it, few things in literary painting are more wonderful than the 
depiction of a professional life of sin and sorrow, so as not even 
to startle those to whom the deeper forms of either are but names 
and shadows. Other writers would have given as vivid a picture : 
Defoe would have poured out even a more copious measure of 
telling circumstantiality, but he would have narrated his story 



CHARLES DICKENS 



99 



with an inhuman distinctness, which if not impure is impure; 
French writers, whom we need not name, would have enhanced 
the interest of their narrative by trading on the excitement of 
stimulating scenes. It would be injustice to Mr. Dickens to say 
that he has surmounted these temptations; the unconscious 
evidence of innumerable details proves that, from a certain deli- 
cacy of imagination and purity of spirit, he has not even experi- 
enced them. Criticism is the more bound to dwell at length on 
the merits of these delineations, because no artistic merit can 
make Oliver Twist a pleasing work. The squalid detail of crime 
and misery oppresses us too- much. If it is to be read at all, it 
should be read in the first hardness of the youthful imagination, 
which no touch can move too deeply, and which is never stirred 
with tremulous suffering at the " still sad music of humanity." 1 
The coldest critic in later life may never hope to have again the 
apathy of his boyhood. 

It perhaps follows from what has been said of the character- 
istics of Mr. Dickens's genius, that it would be little skilled in 
planning plots for his novels. He certainly is not so skilled. He 
says in his preface to the Pickwick Papers " that they were designed 
for the introduction of diverting characters and incidents; that 
no ingenuity of plot was attempted, or even at that time considered 
feasible by the author in connection with the desultory plan of 
publication adopted;" and he adds an expression of regret that 
" these chapters had not been strung together on a thread of more 
general interest." It is extremely fortunate that no such attempt 
was made. In the cases in which Mr. Dickens has attempted 
to make a long connected story, or to develop into scenes or inci- 
dents a plan in any degree elaborate, the result has been a complete 
failure. A certain consistency of genius seems necessary for the 
construction of a consecutive plot. An irregular mind naturally 
shows itself in incoherency of incident and aberration of character. 
The method in which Mr. Dickens's mind works, if we are correct 
in our criticism upon it, tends naturally to these blemishes. Cari- 
catures are necessarily isolated; they are produced by the exag- 
geration of certain conspicuous traits and features; each being 
is enlarged on its greatest side; and we laugh at the grotesque 
grouping and the startling contrast. But that connection between 
human beings on which a plot depends is rather severed than 
elucidated by~ the enhancement of their diversities. Interesting 

1 Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey." 



IOO WALTER BAGEHOT 

stories are founded on the intimate relations of men and women. 
These intimate relations are based not on their superficial traits, 
or common occupations, or most visible externalities, but on the 
inner life of heart and feeling. You simply divert attention from 
that secret life by enhancing the perceptible diversities of common 
human nature, and the strange anomalies into which it may be 
distorted. The original germ of Fickwick was a "Club of Oddi- 
ties." The idea was professedly abandoned; but traces of it are 
to be found in all Mr. Dickens's books. It illustrates the pro- 
fessed grotesqueness of the characters as well as their slender con- 
nection. 

The defect of plot is heightened by Mr. Dickens's great, we 
might say complete, inability to make a love-story. A pair of 
lovers is by custom a necessity of narrative fiction, and writers 
who possess a great general range of mundane knowledge, and 
but little knowledge of the special sentimental subject, are often 
in amusing difficulties. The watchful reader observes the transi- 
tion from the hearty description of well-known scenes, of pro- 
saic streets, or journeys by wood and river, to the pale colours of 
ill-attempted poetry, to such sights as the novelist evidently wishes 
that he need not try to see. But few writers exhibit the difficulty 
in so aggravated a form as Mr. Dickens. Most men by taking 
thought can make a lay figure to look not so very unlike a young 
gentleman, and can compose a telling schedule of ladylike charms. 
Mr. Dickens has no power of doing either. The heroic character 
— we do not mean the form of character so called in life and action, 
but that which is hereditary in the heroes of novels — is not 
suited to his style of art. Hazlitt wrote an essay to inquire "Why 
the heroes of romances are insipid;" and without going that 
length it may safely be said that the character of the agreeable 
young gentleman who loves and is loved should not be of the most 
marked sort. Flirtation ought not to be an exaggerated pursuit. 
Young ladies and their admirers should not express themselves 
in the heightened and imaginative phraseology suited to Charley 
Bates and the Dodger. Humour is of no use, for no one makes 
love in jokes: a tinge of insidious satire may perhaps be per- 
mitted as a rare and occasional relief, but it will not be thought 
"a pretty book," if so malicious an element be at all habitually 
perceptible. The broad farce in which Mr. Dickens indulges 
is thoroughly out of place. If you caricature a pair of lovers ever 
so little, by the necessity of their calling you make them ridicu- 



CHARLES DICKENS IOI 

lous. One of Sheridan's best comedies 1 is remarkable for having 
no scene in which the hero and heroine are on the stage together; 
and Mr. Moore suggests 2 that the shrewd wit distrusted his skill 
in the light, dropping love-talk which would have been necessary. 
Mr. Dickens would have done well to imitate so astute a policy; 
but he has none of the managing shrewdness which those who 
look at Sheridan's career attentively will probably think not the 
least remarkable feature in his singular character. Mr. Dickens, 
on the contrary, pours out painful sentiments as if he wished the 
abundance should make up for the inferior quality. The excru- 
ciating writing which is expended on Miss Ruth Pinch 3 passes 
belief. Mr. Dickens is not only unable to make lovers talk, but 
to describe heroines in mere narrative. As has been said, most 
men can make a jumble of blue eyes and fair hair and pearly teeth, 
that does very well for a young lady, at least for a good while; 
but Mr. Dickens will not, probably cannot, attain even to this 
humble measure of descriptive art. He vitiates the repose by 
broad humour, or disenchants the delicacy by an unctuous admira- 
tion. 

This deficiency is probably nearly connected with one of Mr. 
Dickens's most remarkable excellences. No one can read Mr. 
Thackeray's writings without feeling that he is perpetually tread- 
ing as close as he dare to the border-line that separates the world 
which may be described in books from the world which it is pro- 
hibited so to describe. No one knows better than this accomplished 
artist where that line is, and how curious are its windings and turns. 
The charge against him is that he knows it but too well ; that with 
an anxious care and a wistful eye he is ever approximating to its 
edge, and hinting with subtle art how thoroughly he is familiar 
with, and how interesting he could make, the interdicted region on 
the other side. He never violates a single conventional rule ; but 
at the same time the shadow of the immorality that is not seen is 
scarcely ever wanting to his delineation of the society that is seen. 
Every one may perceive what is passing in his fancy. Mr. Dickens 
is chargeable with no such defect : he does not seem to feel the temp- 
tation. By what we may fairly call an instinctive purity of genius, 
he not only observes the conventional rules, but makes excursions 
into topics which no other novelist could safely handle, and, by a 
felicitous instinct, deprives them of all impropriety. No other 

1 " School for Scandal." 2 Life of Sheridan, Vol. I, Chapter V. 

3 In Martin Chuzzlewit. 



102 WALTER BAGEHOT 

writer could have managed the humour of Mrs. Gamp without 
becoming unendurable. At the same time it is difficult not to be- 
lieve that this singular insensibility to the temptations to which 
many of the greatest novelists have succumbed is in some measure 
connected with his utter inaptitude for delineating the portion of 
life to which their art is specially inclined. He delineates neither 
the love-affairs which ought to be, nor those which ought not to 
be. 

Mr. Dickens's indisposition to "make capital" out of the most 
commonly tempting part of human sentiment is the more remark- 
able because he certainly does not show the same indisposition in 
other cases. He has naturally great powers of pathos ; his imagi- 
nation is familiar with the common sort of human suffering; 
and his marvellous conversancy with the detail of existence enables 
him to describe sick-beds and death-beds with an excellence very 
rarely seen in literature. A nature far more sympathetic than that 
of most authors has familiarized him with such subjects. In 
general, a certain apathy is characteristic of book-writers, and 
dulls the efficacy of their pathos. Mr. Dickens is quite exempt 
from this defect; but, on the other hand, is exceedingly prone to a 
very ostentatious exhibition of the opposite excellence. He dwells 
on dismal scenes with a kind of fawning fondness; and he seems 
unwilling to leave them, long after his readers have had more than 
enough of them. He describes Mr. Dennis the hangman 1 as 
having a professional fondness for his occupation : he has the same 
sort of fondness apparently for the profession of death-painter. 
The painful details he accumulates are a very serious drawback 
from the agreeableness of his writings. Dismal "light literature" 
is the dismalest of reading. The reality of the police reports is 
sufficiently bad, but a fictitious police report would be the most 
disagreeable of conceivable compositions. Some portions of Mr. 
Dickens's books are liable to a good many of the same objections. 
They are squalid from noisome trivialities, and horrid with terrify- 
ing crime. In his earlier books this is commonly relieved at fre- 
quent intervals by a graphic and original mirth. As, we will not 
say age, but maturity, has passed over his powers, this counterac- 
tive element has been lessened; the humour is not so happy as it 
was, but the wonderful fertility in painful miniitice still remains. 

Mr. Dickens's political opinions have subjected him to a good 
deal of criticism, and to some ridicule. He has shown, on many 

1 In Barnaby Rudge. 



CHARLES DICKENS 1 03 

occasions, the desire — which we see so frequent among able and 
influential men — to start as a political reformer. Mr. Spurgeon 
said, with an application to himself: "If you've got the ear of the 
public, of course you must begin to tell it its faults." Mr. Dickens 
has been quite disposed to make this use of his popular influence. 
Even in Pickwick there are many traces of this tendency ; and the 
way in which it shows itself in that book and in others is very char- 
acteristic of the time at which they appeared. The most instruc- 
tive political characteristic of the years 1825 to 1845 i s the growth 
and influence of the scheme of opinion which we call Radicalism. 
There are several species of creeds which are comprehended under 
this generic name, but they all evince a marked reaction against the 
worship of the English constitution and the affection for the Eng- 
lish status quo, which were then the established creed and senti- 
ment. All Radicals are Anti-Eldonites. This is equally true of 
the Benthamite or philosophical radicalism of the early period, 
and the Manchester, or "definite-grievance radicalism," among the 
last vestiges of which we are now living. Mr. Dickens represents 
a species different from either. His is what we may call the "sen- 
timental radicalism"; and if we recur to the history of the time, 
we shall find that there would not originally have been any oppro- 
brium attaching to such a name. The whole course of the legis- 
lation, and still more of the administration, of the first twenty 
years of the nineteenth century was marked by a harsh unfeeling- 
ness which is of all faults the most contrary to any with which we 
are chargeable now. The world of the "Six Acts," 1 of the fre- 
quent executions, of the Draconic criminal law, is so far removed 
from us that we cannot comprehend its having ever existed. It 
is more easy to understand the recoil which has followed. All 
the social speculation, and much of the social action of the few years 
succeeding the Reform Bill, bear the most marked traces of the 
reaction. The spirit which animates Mr. Dickens's political 
reasonings and observations expresses it exactly. The vice of the 
then existing social authorities, and of the then existing public, 
had been the forgetfulness of the pain which their own acts evi- 
dently produced, — an unrealizing habit which adhered to official 
rules and established maxims, and which would not be shocked 
by the evident consequences, by proximate human suffering. 

1 Of 23d November, 3d December, and 17th December, 1819; introduced by 
Eldon, Sidmouth, and Castlereagh, to put down sedition, just after the Manchester 
massacre and the Cato Street conspiracy. (Forrest Morgan.) 



104 WALTER BAGEHOT 

The sure result of this habit was the excitement of the habit pre- 
cisely opposed to it. Mr. Carlyle, in his Chartism, we think, 
observes of the poor-law reform: "It was then, above all things, 
necessary that outdoor relief should cease. But how? What 
means did great Nature take for accomplishing that most desirable 
end ? She created a race of men who believed the cessation of out- 
door relief to be the one thing needful." In the same way, and 
by the same propensity to exaggerated opposition which is inherent 
in human nature, the unfeeling obtuseness of the early part of this 
century was to be corrected by an extreme, perhaps an excessive, 
sensibility to human suffering in the years which have followed. 
There was most adequate reason for the sentiment in its origin, 
and it had a great task to perform in ameliorating harsh customs 
and repealing dreadful penalties ; but it has continued to repine at 
such evils long after they ceased to exist, and when the only facts 
that at all resemble them are the necessary painfulness of due 
punishment and the necessary rigidity of established law. Mr. 
Dickens is an example both of the proper use and of the abuse of the 
sentiment. His earlier works have many excellent descriptions 
of the abuses which had descended to the present generation from 
others whose sympathy with pain was less tender. Nothing can be 
better than the description of the poor debtors' gaol in Pickwick, 
or of the old parochial authorities in Oliver Twist. No doubt these 
descriptions are caricatures, all his delineations are so; but the 
beneficial use of such art can hardly be better exemplified. Hu- 
man nature endures the aggravation of vices and foibles in written 
description better than that of excellences. We cannot bear to 
hear even the hero of a book forever called "just"; we detest 
the recurring praise even of beauty, much more of virtue. The 
moment you begin to exaggerate a character of true excellence, 
you spoil it ; the traits are too delicate not to be injured by heighten- 
ing, or marred by overemphasis. But a beadle is made for cari- 
cature. The slight measure of pomposity that humanizes his 
unfeelingness introduces the requisite comic element; even the 
turnkeys of a debtors' prison may by skilful hands be similarly used. 
The contrast between the destitute condition of Job Trotter and 
Mr. Jingle and their former swindling triumph is made comic by 
a rarer touch of unconscious art. Mr. Pickwick's warm heart 
takes so eager an interest in the misery of his old enemies, that our 
colder nature is tempted to smile. We endure the over-intensity, 
at any rate the unnecessary aggravation, of the surrounding misery ; 



CHARLES DICKENS 105 

and we endure it willingly, because it brings out better than any- 
thing else could have done the half-comic intensity of a sympathetic 
nature. 

It is painful to pass from these happy instances of well-used 
power to the glaring abuses of the same faculty in Mr. Dickens's 
later books. He began by describing really removable evils in a 
style which would induce all persons, however insensible, to remove 
them if they could; he has ended by describing the natural evils 
and inevitable pains of the present state of being, in such a manner 
as must tend to excite discontent and repining. The result is 
aggravated, because Mr. Dickens never ceases to hint that these 
evils are removable, though he does not say by what means. 
Nothing is easier than to show the evils of anything. Mr. Dickens 
has not unfrequently spoken, and, what is worse, he has taught a 
great number of parrot-like imitators to speak, in what really is, 
if they knew it, a tone of objection to the necessary constitution of 
human society. If you will only write a description of it, any form 
of government will seem ridiculous. What is more absurd than a 
despotism, even at its best ? A king of ability or an able minister 
sits in an orderly room filled with memorials, and returns, and 
documents, and memoranda. These are his world; among these 
he of necessity lives and moves. Yet how little of the real life of 
the nation he governs can be represented in an official form ! How 
much of real suffering is there that statistics can never tell ! how 
much of obvious good is there that no memorandum to a minister 
will ever mention ! how much deception is there in what such 
documents contain ! how monstrous must be the ignorance of the 
closet statesman, after all his life of labour, of much that a plough- 
man could tell him of ! A free government is almost worse, as it 
must read in a written delineation. Instead of the real attention 
of a laborious and anxious statesman, we have now the shifting 
caprices of a popular assembly — elected for one object, deciding 
on another ; changing with the turn of debate ; shifting in its very 
composition; one set of men coming down to vote to-day, to- 
morrow another and often unlike set, most of them eager for the 
dinner-hour, actuated by unseen influences, by a respect for their 
constituents, by the dread of an attorney in a far-off borough. 
What people are these to control a nation's destinies, and wield 
the power of an empire, and regulate the happiness of millions ! 
Either way we are at fault. Free government seems an absurdity, 
and despotism is so too. Again, every form of law has a distinct 



106 WALTER BAGEHOT 

expression, a rigid procedure, customary rules and forms. It is 
administered by human beings liable to mistake, confusion, and 
forgetfulness, and in the long run, and on the average, is sure to be 
tainted with vice and fraud. Nothing can be easier than to make 
a case, as we may say, against any particular system, by pointing 
out with emphatic caricature its inevitable miscarriages, and by 
pointing out nothing else. Those who so address us may assume 
a tone of philanthropy, and forever exult that they are not so unfeel- 
ing as other men are; but the real tendency of their exhortations 
is to make men dissatisfied with their inevitable condition, and, 
what is worse, to make them fancy that its irremediable evils can 
be remedied, and indulge in a succession of vague strivings and 
restless changes. Such, however — though in a style of expres- 
sion somewhat different — is very much the tone with which Mr. 
Dickens and his followers have in later years made us familiar. 
To the second-hand repeaters of a cry so feeble, we can have noth- 
ing to say ; if silly people cry because they think the world is silly, 
let them cry; but the founder of the school cannot, we are per- 
suaded, peruse without mirth the lachrymose eloquence which his 
disciples have perpetrated. The soft moisture of irrelevant senti- 
ment cannot have entirely entered into his soul. A truthful 
genius must have forbidden it. Let us hope that his pernicious 
example may incite some one of equal genius to preach with equal 
efficiency a sterner and a wiser gospel; but there is no need just 
now for us to preach it without genius. 

There has been much controversy about Mr. Dickens's taste. 
A great many cultivated people will scarcely concede that he has 
any taste at all; a still larger number of fervent admirers point, 
on the other hand, to a hundred felicitous descriptions and delinea- 
tions which abound in apt expressions and skilful turns and happy 
images, — in which it would be impossible to alter a single word 
without altering for the worse ; and naturally inquire whether such 
excellences in what is written do not indicate good taste in the 
writer. The truth is, that Mr. Dickens has what we may call 
creative taste; that is to say, the habit or faculty, whichever 
we may choose to call it, which at the critical instant of artistic 
production offers to the mind the right word, and the right word 
only. If he is engaged on a good subject for caricature, there will 
be no defect of taste to preclude the caricature from being excel- 
lent. But it is only in moments of imaginative production that he 
has any taste at all. His works nowhere indicate that he possesses 



CHARLES DICKENS I07 

in any degree the passive taste which decides what is good in the 
writings of other people, and what is not, and which performs the 
same critical duty upon a writer's own efforts when the confusing 
mists of productive imagination have passed away. Nor has Mr. 
Dickens the gentlemanly instinct which in many minds supplies 
the place of purely critical discernment, and which, by constant 
association with those who know what is best, acquires a second- 
hand perception of that which is best. He has no tendency to con- 
ventionalism for good or for evil ; his merits are far removed from 
the ordinary path of writers, and it was not probably so much 
effort to him as to other men to step so far out of that path : he 
scarcely knew how far it was. For the same reason, he cannot 
tell how faulty his writing will often be thought, for he cannot 
tell what people will think. 

A few pedantic critics have regretted that Mr. Dickens had not 
received what they call a regular education. And if we under- 
stand their meaning, we believe they mean to regret that he had not 
received a course of discipline which would probably have impaired 
his powers. A regular education should mean that ordinary 
system of regulation and instruction which experience has shown to 
fit men best for the ordinary pursuits of life. It applies the requi- 
site discipline to each faculty in the exact proportion in which 
that faculty is wanted in the pursuits of life; it develops under- 
standing, and memory, and imagination, each in accordance with 
the scale prescribed. To men of ordinary faculties this is nearly 
essential; it is the only mode in which they can be fitted for the 
inevitable competition of existence. To men of regular and sym- 
metrical genius also, such a training will often be beneficial. The 
world knows pretty well what are the great tasks of the human mind, 
and has learned in the course of ages with some accuracy what is 
the kind of culture likely to promote their exact performance. A 
man of abilities extraordinary in degree but harmonious in pro- 
portion will be the better for having submitted to the kind of dis- 
cipline which has been ascertained to fit a man for the work to 
which powers in that proportion are best fitted; he will do what 
he has to do better and more gracefully; culture will add a touch 
to the finish of nature. But the case is very different with men of 
irregular and anomalous genius, whose excellences consist in the 
aggravation of some special faculty, or at the most one or two. 
The discipline which will fit such a man for the production of great 
literary works is that which will most develop the peculiar powers 



108 WALTER BAGEBOT 

in which he excels ; the rest of the mind will be far less important ; 
it will not be likely that the culture which is adapted to promote this 
special development will also be that which is most fitted for ex- 
panding the powers of common men in common directions. The 
precise problem is to develop the powers of a strange man in a 
strange direction. In the case of Mr. Dickens, it would have 
been absurd to have shut up his observant youth within the walls 
of a college. They would have taught him nothing about Mrs. 
Gamp there; Sam Weller took no degree. The kind of early 
life fitted to develop the power of apprehensive observation is a 
brooding life in stirring scenes ; the idler in the streets of life knows 
the streets; the bystander knows the picturesque effect of life 
better than the player; and the meditative idler amid the hum of 
existence is much more likely to know its sound and to take in and 
comprehend its depths and meanings than the scholastic student 
intent on books, which, if they represent any world, represent one 
which has long passed away, — which commonly try rather to 
develop the reasoning understanding than the seeing observation, 
— which are written in languages that have long been dead. 
You will not train by such discipline a caricaturist of obvious 
manners. 

Perhaps, too, a regular instruction and daily experience of the 
searching ridicule of critical associates would have detracted 
from the pluck which Mr. Dickens shows in all his writings. It 
requires a great deal of courage to be a humorous writer ; you are 
always afraid that people will laugh at you instead of with you: 
undoubtedly there is a certain eccentricity about it. You take up 
the esteemed writers, Thucydides and the Saturday Review; 
after all, they do not make you laugh. It is not the function of 
really artistic productions to contribute to the mirth of human 
beings. All sensible men are afraid of it, and it is only with an 
extreme effort that a printed joke attains to the perusal of the pub- 
lic : the chances are many to one that the anxious producer loses 
heart in the correction of the press, and that the world never 
laughs at all. Mr. Dickens is quite exempt from this weakness. 
He has what a Frenchman might call the courage of his faculty. 
The real daring which is shown in the Pickwick Papers, in the whole 
character of Mr. Weller senior, as well as in that of his son, is 
immense, far surpassing any which has been shown by any other 
contemporary writer. The brooding irregular mind is in its first 
stage prone to this sort of courage. It perhaps knows that its 



CHARLES DICKENS lop 

ideas are "out of the way"; but with the infantine simplicity of 
youth, it supposes that originality is an advantage. Persons more 
familiar with the ridicule of their equals in station (and this is to 
most men the great instructress of the college time) well know 
that of all qualities this one most requires to be clipped and pared 
and measured. Posterity, we doubt not, will be entirely perfect 
in every conceivable element of judgment; but the existing genera- 
tion like what they have heard before — it is much easier. It re- 
quired great courage in Mr. Dickens to write what his genius has 
compelled them to appreciate. 

We have throughout spoken of Mr. Dickens as he was, rather 
than as he is ; or, to use a less discourteous phrase, and we hope a 
truer, of his early works rather than of those which are more 
recent. We could not do otherwise consistently with the true code 
of criticism. A man of great genius, who has written great and 
enduring works, must be judged mainly by them ; and not by the 
inferior productions which, from the necessities of personal posi- 
tion, a fatal facility of composition, or other cause, he may pour forth 
at moments less favourable to his powers. Those who are called 
on to review these inferior productions themselves, must speak 
of them in the terms they may deserve ; but those who have the more 
pleasant task of estimating as a whole the genius of the writer, 
may confine their attention almost wholly to those happier efforts 
which illustrate that genius. We should not like to have to speak 
in detail of Mr. Dickens's later works, and we have not done so. 
There are, indeed, peculiar reasons why a genius constituted as his 
is (at least if we are correct in the view which we have taken of it) 
would not endure without injury during a long life the applause 
of the many, the temptations of composition, and the general ex- 
citement of existence. Even in his earlier works it was impossible 
not to fancy that there was a weakness of fibre unfavourable to the 
longevity of excellence. This was the effect of his deficiency in 
those masculine faculties of which we have said so much, — the 
reasoning understanding and firm far-seeing sagacity. It is these 
two component elements which stiffen the mind, and give a con- 
sistency to the creed and a coherence to its effects, — which enable 
it to protect itself from the rush of circumstances. If to a deficiency 
in these we add an extreme sensibility to circumstances, — a 
mobility, as Lord Byron used to call it, of emotion, which is easily 
impressed, and stifl more easily carried away by impression, — 
we have the idea of a character peculiarly unfitted to bear the flux 



HO WALTER BAGEHOT 

of time and chance. A man of very great determination could 
hardly bear up against them with such slight aids from within and 
with such peculiar sensibility to temptation. A man of merely 
ordinary determination would succumb to it; and Mr. Dickens 
has succumbed. His position was certainly unfavourable. He 
has told us that the works of his later years, inferior as all good 
critics have deemed them, have yet been more read than those of 
his earlier and healthier years. The most characteristic part of his 
audience, the lower middle-class, were ready to receive with de- 
light the least favourable productions of genius. Human nature 
cannot endure this ; it is too much to have to endure a coincident 
temptation both from within and from without. Mr. Dickens was 
too much inclined by natural disposition to lachrymose eloquence 
and exaggerated caricature. Such was the kind of writing which 
he wrote most easily. He found likewise that such was the kind 
of writing that was read most readily ; and of course he wrote that 
kind. Who would have done otherwise? No critic is entitled 
to speak very harshly of such degeneracy, if he is not sure that he 
could have coped with difficulties so peculiar. If that rule is to 
be observed, who is there that will not be silent ? No other Eng- 
lishman has attained such a hold on the vast populace ; it is little, 
therefore, to say that no other has surmounted its attendant temp- 
tations. 



VI 

WALTER PATER 

(1839-1894) 

WORDSWORTH 

[From Appreciations, 1889. First published in the Fortnightly Review 
for April, 1874.] 

Some English critics at the beginning of the present century- 
had a great deal to say concerning a distinction, of much impor- 
tance, as they thought, in the true estimate of poetry, between the 
Fancy, and another more powerful faculty — the Imagination. 
This metaphysical distinction, borrowed originally from the 
writings of German philosophers, and perhaps not always clearly 
apprehended by those who talked of it, involved a far deeper and 
more vital distinction, with which indeed all true criticism more or 
less directly has to do, the distinction, namely, between higher 
and lower degrees of intensity in the poet's perception of his subject, 
and in his concentration of himself upon his work. Of those who 
dwelt upon the metaphysical distinction between the Fancy and the 
Imagination, it was Wordsworth who made the most of it, assum- 
ing it as the basis for the final classification of his poetical writings ; 
and it is in these writings that the deeper and more vital distinc- 
tion, which, as I have said, underlies the metaphysical distinction, 
is most needed, and may best be illustrated. 

For nowhere is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth's 
own poetry, of work touched with intense and individual power, 
with work of almost no character at all. He has much conven- 
tional sentiment, and some of that insincere poetic diction, against 
which his most serious critical efforts were directed : the reaction 
in his political ideas, consequent on the excesses of 1795, makes 
him, at times, a mere declaimer on moral and social topics; and 
he seems, sometimes, to force an unwilling pen, and write by rule. 
By making the most of these blemishes it is possible to obscure the 

in 



112 WALTER PATER 

true aesthetic value of his work, just as his life also, a life of much 
quiet delicacy and independence, might easily be placed in a false 
focus, and made to appear a somewhat tame theme in illustration 
of the more obvious parochial virtues. And those who wish to 
understand his influence, and experience his peculiar savour, must 
bear with patience the presence of an alien element in Words- 
worth's work, which never coalesced with what is really delightful 
in it, nor underwent his special power. Who that values his writ- 
ings most has not felt the intrusion there, from time to time, of 
something tedious and prosaic? Of all poets equally great, he 
would gain most by a skilfully made anthology. Such a selection 
would show, in truth, not so much what he was, or to himself or 
others seemed to be, as what, by the more energetic and fertile 
quality in his writings, he was ever tending to become. And the 
mixture in his work, as it actually stands, is so perplexed, that one 
fears to miss the least promising composition even, lest some pre- 
cious morsel should be lying hidden within — the few perfect lines, 
the phrase, the single word perhaps, to which he often works up 
mechanically through a poem, almost the whole of which may be 
tame enough. He who thought that in all creative work the larger 
part was given passively, to the recipient mind, who waited so duti- 
fully upon the gift, to whom so large a measure was sometimes 
given, had his times also of desertion and relapse; and he has per- 
mitted the impress of these too to remain in his work. And this 
duality there — the fitfulness with which the higher qualities mani- 
fest themselves in it, gives the effect in his poetry of a power not 
altogether his own, or under his control, which comes and goes 
when it will, lifting or lowering a matter, poor in itself ; so that that 
old fancy which made the poet's art an enthusiasm, a form of divine 
possession, seems almost literally true of him. 

This constant suggestion of an absolute duality between higher 
and lower moods, and the work done in them, stimulating one 
always to look below the surface, makes the reading of Wordsworth 
an excellent sort of training towards the things of art and poetry. 
It begets in those, who, coming across him in youth, can bear him 
at all, a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in the effect of 
concentration and collectedness of mind in the right appreciation 
of poetry, an expectation of things, in this order, coming to one by 
means of a right discipline of the temper as well as of the intellect. 
He meets us with the promise that he has much, and something 
very peculiar, to give us, if we will follow a certain difficult way, 



WORDSWORTH 113 

and seems to have the secret of a special and privileged state of 
mind. And those who have undergone his influence, and followed 
this difficult way, are like people who have passed through some 
initiation, a disciplina arcani, 1 by submitting to which they become 
able constantly to distinguish in art, speech, feeling, manners, that 
which is organic, animated, expressive, from that which is only con- 
ventional, derivative, inexpressive. 

But although the necessity of selecting these precious morsels 
for one's self is an opportunity for the exercise of Wordsworth's 
peculiar influence, and induces a kind of just criticism and true 
estimate of it, yet the purely literary product would have been 
more excellent, had the writer himself purged away that alien ele- 
ment. How perfect would have been the little treasury, shut be- 
tween the covers of how thin a book 1 Let us suppose the desired 
separation made, the electric thread untwined, the golden pieces, 
great and small, lying apart together. 2 What are the peculiarities 
of this residue? What special sense does Wordsworth exercise, 
and what instincts does he satisfy? What are the subjects and 
the motives which in him excite the imaginative faculty? What 
are the qualities in things and persons which he values, the impres- 
sion and sense of which he can convey to others, in an extra- 
ordinary way ? 

An intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, 
which weighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed 
roughly by, is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry. 
It has been remarked as a fact in mental history again and again. 
It reveals itself in many forms ; but is strongest and most attrac- 
tive in what is strongest and most attractive in modern literature. 
It is exemplified, almost equally, by writers as unlike each other as 
Senancour and Theophile Gautier: as a singular chapter in the 
history of the human mind, its growth might be traced from Rous- 
seau to Chateaubriand, from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo: it 
has doubtless some latent connection with those pantheistic theories 
which locate an intelligent soul in material things, and have largely 
exercised men's minds in some modern systems of philosophy: 
it is traceable even in the graver writings of historians : it makes 
as much difference between ancient and modern landscape art, 

1 [A training in solving mystery.] 

2 Since this essay was written, such selections have been made, with excellent 
taste, by Matthew Arnold and Professor Knight. 



114 WALTER PATER 

as there is between the rough masks of an early mosaic and a por- 
trait by Reynolds or Gainsborough. Of this new sense, the writ- 
ings of Wordsworth are the central and elementary expression: 
he is more simply and entirely occupied with it than any other poet, 
though there are fine expressions of precisely the same thing in so 
different a poet as Shelley. There was in his own character a 
certain contentment, a sort of inborn religious placidity, seldom 
found united with a sensibility so mobile as his, which was favour- 
able to the quiet, habitual observation of inanimate, or imperfectly 
animate, existence. His life of eighty years is divided by no very 
profoundly felt incidents: its changes are almost wholly inward, 
and it falls into broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous 
spaces. What it most resembles is the life of one of those early 
Italian or Flemish painters, who, just because their minds were 
full of heavenly visions, passed, some of them, the better part of 
sixty years in quiet, systematic industry. This placid life matured 
a quite unusual sensibility, really innate in him, to the sights and 
sounds of the natural world — the flower and its shadow on the 
stone, the cuckoo and its echo. The poem of Resolution and Inde- 
pendence is a storehouse of such records : for its fulness of imagery 
it may be compared to Keats's Saint Agnes' Eve. To read one of 
his longer pastoral poems for the first time, is like a day spent in a 
new country : the memory is crowded for a while with its precise 
and vivid incidents : — 

" The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze 
On some grey rock" ; — 

" The single sheep and the one blasted tree 
And the bleak music from that old stone wall" ; 

"And in the meadows and the lower grounds 
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn" ; — 

" And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears." 

Clear and delicate at once, as he is in the outlining of visible 
imagery, he is more clear and delicate still, and finely scrupulous, 
in the noting of sounds ; so that he conceives of noble sound as even 
moulding the human countenance to nobler types, and as something 
actually "profaned " by colour, by visible form, or image. He has 
a power likewise of realizing, and conveying to the consciousness of 
the reader, abstract and elementary impressions — silence, dark- 
ness, absolute motionlessness : or, again, the whole complex sen- 



WORDSWORTH 115 

timent of a particular place, the abstract expression of desolation 
in the long white road, of peacefulness in a particular folding of the 
hills. In the airy building of the brain, a special day or hour even, 
comes to have for him a sort of personal identity, a spirit or angel 
given to it, by which, for its exceptional insight, or the happy light 
upon it, it has a presence in one's history, and acts there, as a sepa- 
rate power or accomplishment ; and he has celebrated in many of 
his poems the "efficacious spirit," which, as he says, resides in 
these "particular spots" of time. 

It is to such a world, and to a world of congruous meditation 
thereon, that we see him retiring in his but lately published poem 
of The Recluse — taking leave, without much count of costs, of the 
world of business, of action and ambition, as also of all that for 
the majority of mankind counts as sensuous enjoyment. 1 

1 In Wordsworth's prefatory advertisement to the first edition of The Prelude, 
published in 1850, it is stated that the work was intended to be introductory to The 
Recluse; and that The Recluse, if completed, would have consisted of three parts. 
The second part is The Excursion. The third part was only planned; but the 
first book of the first part was left in manuscript by Wordsworth — though in 
manuscript, it is said, in no great condition of forwardness for the printers. This 
book, now for the first time printed in extenso (a very noble passage from it found 
place in that prose advertisement to The Excursion), is included in the latest edi- 
tion of Wordsworth by Mr. John Morley. It was well worth adding to the poet's 
great bequest to English literature. A true student of his work, who has formu- 
lated for himself what he supposes to be the leading characteristics of Wordsworth's 
genius, will feel, we think, lively interest in testing them by the various fine pas- 
sages in what is here presented for the host time. Let the following serve for a 
sample : — 

Thickets full of songsters, and the voice 

Of lordly birds, an unexpected sound 

Heard now and then from morn to latest eve, 

Admonishing the man who walks below 

Of solitude and silence in the sky : — ■ 

These have we, and a thousand nooks of earth 

Have also these, but nowhere else is found, 

Nowhere (or is it fancy ?) can be found 

The one sensation that is here; 'tis here, 

Here as it found its way into my heart 

In childhood, here as it abides by day, 

By night, here only; or in chosen minds 

That take it with them hence, where'er they go. 

— 'Tis, but I cannot name it, 'tis the sense 

Of majesty, and beauty, and repose, 

A blended holiness of earth and sky, 

Something that makes this individual spot 

This small abiding-place of many men, 

A termination, and a last retreat, 

A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will, 

A whole without dependence or defect, 

Made for itself, and happy in itself, 

Perfect contentment, Unity entire. 



Il6 WALTER PATER 

And so it came about that this sense of a life in natural objects, 
which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, is with Wordsworth 
the assertion of what for him is almost literal fact. To him every 
natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual 
life, to be capable of a companionship with man, full of expression, 
of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse. An emana- 
tion, a particular spirit, belonged, not to the moving leaves or water 
only, but to the distant peak of the hills arising suddenly, by some 
change of perspective, above the nearer horizon, to the passing space 
of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a 
certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. It was like 
a "survival," in the peculiar intellectual temperament of a man of 
letters at the end of the eighteenth century, of that primitive condi- 
tion, which some philosophers have traced in the general history 
of human culture, wherein all outward objects alike, including even 
the works of men's hands, were believed to be endowed with ani- 
mation, and the world was ■" full of souls" — that mood in which 
the old Greek gods were first begotten, and which had many strange 
aftergrowths. 

In the early ages, this belief, delightful as its effects on poetry 
often are, was but the result of a crude intelligence. But, in Words- 
worth, such power of seeing life, such perception of a soul, in inani- 
mate things, came of an exceptional susceptibility to the impres- 
sions of eye and ear, and was, in its essence, a kind of sensuousness. 
At least, it is only in a temperament exceptionally susceptible on 
the sensuous side, that this sense of the expressiveness of outward 
things comes to be so large a part of life. That he awakened "a 
sort of thought in sense," is Shelley's just estimate of this element 
in Wordsworth's poetry. 

And it was through nature, thus ennobled by a semblance of 
passion and thought, that he approached the spectacle of human 
life. Human life, indeed, is for him, at first, only an additional, 
accidental grace on an expressive landscape. When he thought 
of man, it was of man as in the presence and under the influence of 
these effective natural objects, and linked to them by many asso- 
ciations. The close connection of man with natural objects, the 
habitual association of his thoughts and feelings with a particular 
spot of earth, has sometimes seemed to degrade those who are sub- 
ject to its influence, as if it did but reenforce that physical connection 
of our nature with the actual lime and clay of the soil, which is 
always drawing us nearer to our end. But for Wordsworth, these 



WORDSWORTH 1 1 7 

influences tended to the dignity of human nature, because they 
tended to tranquillize it. By raising nature to the level of human 
thought he gives it power and expression : he subdues man to the 
level of nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth and cool- 
ness and solemnity. The leech-gatherer on the moor, the woman 
"stepping westward," are for him natural objects, almost in the 
same sense as the aged thorn, or the lichened rock on the heath. 
In this sense the leader of the "Lake School," in spite of an earnest 
preoccupation with man, his thoughts, his destiny, is the poet of 
nature. And of nature, after all, in its modesty. The English 
lake country has, of course, its grandeurs. But the peculiar func- 
tion of Wordsworth's genius, as carrying in it a power to open out 
the soul of apparently little or familiar things, would have found its 
true test had he become the poet of Surrey, say ! and the prophet 
of its life. The glories of Italy and Switzerland, though he did 
write a little about them, had too potent a material life of their own 
to serve greatly his poetic purpose. 

Religious sentiment, consecrating the affections and natural 
regrets of the human heart, above all, that pitiful awe and care for 
the perishing human clay, of which relic-worship is but the corrup- 
tion, has always had much to do with localities, with the thoughts 
which attach themselves to actual scenes and places. Now what 
is true of it everywhere, is truest of it in those secluded valleys 
where one generation after another maintains the same abiding- 
place; and it was on this side, that Wordsworth apprehended 
religion most strongly. Consisting, as it did so much, in the recog- 
nition of local sanctities, in the habit of connecting the stones and 
trees of a particular spot of earth with the great events of life, till 
the low walls, the green mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs 
seemed full of voices, and a sort of natural oracles, the very religion 
of these people of the dales appeared but as another link between 
them and the earth, and was literally a religion of nature. It 
tranquillized them by bringing them under the placid rule of tra- 
ditional and narrowly localized observances. "Grave livers," 
they seemed to him, under this aspect, with stately speech, and 
something of that natural dignity of manners, which underlies 
the highest courtesy. 

And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solem- 
nized in proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him 
into companionship with permanent natural objects, his very 
religion forming new links for him with the narrow limits of the 



Il8 WALTER PATER 

valley, the low vaults of his church, the rough stones of his home, 
made intense for him now with profound sentiment, Wordsworth 
was able to appreciate passion in the lowly. He chooses to depict 
people from humble life, because, being nearer to nature than 
others, they are on the whole more impassioned, certainly more 
direct in their expression of passion, than other men : it is for this 
direct expression of passion, that he values their humble words. 
In much that he said in exaltation of rural life, he was but pleading 
indirectly for that sincerity, that perfect fidelity to one's own 
inward presentations, to the precise features of the picture within, 
without which any profound poetry is impossible. It was not for 
their tameness, but for this passionate sincerity, that he chose inci- 
dents and situations from common life, " related in a selection of 
language really used by men." He constantly endeavours to 
bring his language near to the real language of men : to the real 
language of men, however, not on the dead level of their ordinary 
intercourse, but in select moments of vivid sensation, when this 
language is winnowed and ennobled by excitement. There are 
poets who have chosen rural life as their subject, for the sake of its 
passionless repose, and times when Wordsworth himself extols 
the mere calm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest 
aim of poetical culture. But it was not for such passionless calm 
that he preferred the scenes of pastoral life; and the meditative 
poet, sheltering himself, as it might seem, from the agitations of 
the outward world, is in reality only clearing the scene for the great 
exhibitions of emotion, and what he values most is the almost ele- 
mentary expression of elementary feelings. 

And so he has much for those who value highly the concentrated 
presentment of passion, who appraise men and women by their 
susceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle 
of it. Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of thei : 
daily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those great ele- 
mentary feelings, lifting and solemnizing their language and giving 
it a natural music. The great, distinguishing passion came to 
Michael by the sheepfold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding these 
humble children of the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate 
souls. In this respect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that of 
George Sand, in those of her novels which depict country life. 
With a penetrative pathos, which puts him in the same rank with 
the masters of the sentiment of pity in literature, with Meinhold 
and Victor Hugo, he collects all the traces of vivid excitement 



WORDSWORTH Iig 

which were to be found in that pastoral world — the girl who rung 
her father's knell ; the unborn infant feeling about its mother's heart ; 
the instinctive touches of children; the sorrows of the wild crea- 
tures, even — their homesickness, their strange yearnings ; the 
tales of passionate regret that hang by a ruined farm-building, a 
heap of stones, a deserted sheepfold ; that gay, false, adventurous, 
outer world, which breaks in from time to time to bewilder and de- 
flower these quiet homes; not " passionate sorrow" only, for the 
overthrow of the soul's beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for 
personal beauty even, in those whom men have wronged — their 
pathetic wanness; the sailor "who, in his heart, was half a shep- 
herd on the stormy seas"; the wild woman teaching her child to 
pray for her betrayer; incidents like the making of the shepherd's 
staff, or that of the young boy laying the first stone of the sheep- 
fold ; — all the pathetic episodes of their humble existence, their 
longing, their wonder at fortune, their poor pathetic pleasures, 
like the pleasures of children, won so hardly in the struggle for bare 
existence; their yearning towards each other, in their darkened 
houses, or at their early toil. A sort of biblical depth and solem- 
nity hangs over this strange, new, passionate, pastoral world, of 
which he first raised the image, and the reflection of which some 
of our best modern fiction has caught from him. 

He pondered much over the philosophy of his poetry, and read- 
ing deeply in the history of his own mind, seems at times to have 
passed the borders of a world of strange speculations, inconsistent 
enough, had he cared to note such inconsistencies, with those tra- 
ditional beliefs, which were otherwise the object of his devout accept- 
ance. Thinking of the high value he set upon customariness, 
upon all that is habitual, local, rooted in the ground, in matters of 
religious sentiment, you might sometimes regard him as one teth- 
ered down to a world, refined and peaceful indeed, but with no broad 
outlook, a world protected, but somewhat narrowed, by the influ- 
ence of received ideas. But he is at times also something very 
different from this, and something much bolder. A chance ex- 
pression is overheard and placed in a new connection, the sudden 
memory of a thing long past occurs to him, a distant object is re- 
lieved for a while by a random gleam of light — accidents turning 
up for a moment what lies below the surface of our immediate 
experience — and he passes from the humble graves and lowly 
arches of "the little rock-like pile" of a Westmoreland church, 



120 WALTER PATER 

on bold trains of speculative thought, and comes, from point to 
point, into strange contact with thoughts which have visited, 
from time to time, far more venturesome, perhaps errant, spirits. 

He had pondered deeply, for instance, on those strange reminis- 
cences and forebodings, which seem to make our lives stretch 
before and behind us, beyond where we can see or touch anything, 
or trace the lines of connection. Following the soul, backwards 
and forwards, on these endless ways, his sense of man's dim, poten- 
tial powers became a pledge to him, indeed, of a future life, but 
carried him back also to that mysterious notion of an earlier 
state of existence — the fancy of the Platonists — the old heresy 
of Origen. It was in this mood that he conceived those oft- 
reiterated regrets for a half -ideal childhood, when the relics of 
Paradise still clung about the soul — a childhood, as it seemed, full 
of the fruits of old age, lost for all, in a degree, in the passing away 
of the youth of the world, lost for each one, over again, in the 
passing away of actual youth. It is this ideal childhood which he 
celebrates in his famous Ode on the Recollections of Childhood, 
and some other poems which may be grouped around it, such as 
the lines on Tintern Abbey, and something like what he describes 
was actually truer of himself than he seems to have understood; 
for his own most delightful poems were really the instinctive pro- 
ductions of earlier life, and most surely for him, "the first diviner 
influence of this world" passed away, more and more completely, 
in his contact with experience. 

Sometimes as he dwelt upon those moments of profound, im- 
aginative power, in which the outward object appears to take colour 
and expression, a new nature almost, from the prompting of the 
observant mind, the actual world would, as it were, dissolve and 
detach itself, flake by flake, and he himself seemed to be the 
creator, and when he would the destroyer, of the world in which he 
lived — that old isolating thought of many a brain-sick mystic of 
ancient and modern times. 

At other times, again, in those periods of intense susceptibility, 
in which he appeared to himself as but the passive recipient of ex- 
ternal influences, he was attracted by the thought of a spirit of life 
in outward things, a single, all-pervading mind in them, of which 
man, and even the poet's imaginative energy, are but moments 
— that old dream of the anima mundi, the mother of all things and 
their grave, in which some had desired to lose themselves, and 
others had become indifferent to the distinctions of good and evil. 



WORDSWORTH ' 121 

It would come, sometimes, like the sign of the macrocosm to Faust 
in his cell: the network of man and nature was seen to be per- 
vaded by a common, universal life: a new, bold thought lifted 
him above the furrow, above the green turf of the Westmoreland 
churchyard, to a world altogether different in its vagueness and 
vastness, and the narrow glen was full of the brooding power of one 
universal spirit. 

And so he has something, also, for those who feel the fascina- 
tion of bold speculative ideas, who are really capable of rising upon 
them to conditions of poetical thought. He uses them, indeed, 
always with a very fine apprehension of the limits within which 
alone philosophical imaginings have any place in true poetry; 
and using them only for poetical purposes, is not too careful even 
to make them consistent with each other. To him, theories which 
for other men bring a world of technical diction, brought perfect 
form and expression, as in those two lofty books of the Prelude, 
which describe the decay and the restoration of Imagination and 
Taste. Skirting the borders of this world of bewildering heights 
and depths, he got but the first exciting influence of it, that joyful 
enthusiasm which great imaginative theories prompt, when the 
mind first comes to have an understanding of them ; and it is not 
under the influence of these thoughts that his poetry becomes 
tedious or loses its blitheness. He keeps them, too, always within 
certain ethical bounds, so that no word of his could offend the sim- 
plest of those simple souls which are always the largest portion 
of mankind. But it is, nevertheless, the contact of these thoughts, 
the speculative boldness in them, which constitutes, at least for 
some minds, the secret attraction of much of his best poetry — 
the sudden passage from lowly thoughts and places to the majestic 
forms of philosophical imagination, the play of these forms over a 
world so different, enlarging so strangely the bounds of its humble 
churchyards, and breaking such a wild light on the graves of chris- 
tened children. 

And these moods always brought with them faultless expression. 
In regard to expression, as with feeling and thought, the duality of 
the higher and lower moods was absolute. It belonged to the 
higher, the imaginative mood, and was the pledge of its reality, 
to bring the appropriate language with it. In him, when the really 
poetical motive worked at all, it united, with absolute justice, the 
word and the idea; each, in the imaginative flame, becoming in- 



122 WALTER PATER 

separably one with the other, by that fusion of matter and form, 
which is the characteristic of the highest poetical expression. His 
words are themselves thought and feeling; not eloquent, or musical 
words merely, but that sort of creative language which carries 
the reality of what it depicts, directly, to the consciousness. 

The music of mere metre performs but a limited, yet a very 
peculiar and subtly ascertained function, in Wordsworth's poetry. 
With him, metre is but an additional grace, accessory to that 
deeper music of words and sounds, that moving power, which they 
exercise in the nobler prose no less than in formal poetry. It is 
a sedative to that excitement, an excitement sometimes almost 
painful, under which the language, alike of poetry and prose, at- 
tains a rhythmical power, independent of metrical combination, 
and dependent rather on some subtle adjustment of the elementary 
sounds of words themselves to the image or feeling they convey. 
Yet some of his pieces, pieces prompted by a sort of half-playful 
mysticism, like the Daffodils and The Two April Mornings, are 
distinguished by a certain quaint gayety of metre, and rival by their 
perfect execution, in this respect, similar pieces among our own 
Elizabethan, or contemporary French poetry. And those who 
take up these poems after an interval of months, or years perhaps, 
may be surprised at finding how well old favourites wear, how their 
strange, inventive turns of diction or thought still send through 
them the old feeling of surprise. Those who lived about Words- 
worth were all great lovers of the older English literature, and often- 
times there came out in him a noticeable likeness to our earlier 
poets. He quotes unconsciously, but with new power of meaning, 
a clause from one of Shakespeare's sonnets; and, as with some 
other men's most famous work, the Ode on the Recollections of 
Childhood had its anticipator. 1 He drew something too from the 
unconscious mysticism of the old English language itself, drawing 
out the inward significance of its racy idiom, and the not wholly 
unconscious poetry of the language used by the simplest people 
under strong excitement — language, therefore, at its origin. 

The office of the poet is not that of the moralist, and the first aim 
of Wordsworth's poetry is to give the reader a peculiar kind of 
pleasure. But through his poetry, and through this pleasure in 
it, he does actually convey to the reader an extraordinary wisdom 
in the things of practice. One lesson, if men must have lessons, 
1 Henry Vaughan, in The Retreat. 



WORDSWORTH 123 

he conveys more clearly than all, the supreme importance of con- 
templation in the conduct of life. 

Contemplation — impassioned contemplation — that is with 
Wordsworth the end-in-itself, the perfect end. We see the ma- 
jority of mankind going most often to definite ends, lower or 
higher ends, as their own instincts may determine;- but the end 
may never be attained, and the means not be quite the right means, 
great ends and little ones alike being, for the most part, distant, 
and the ways to them, in this dim world, somewhat vague. Mean- 
time, to higher or lower ends, they move too often with something 
of a sad countenance, with hurried and ignoble gait, becoming, 
unconsciously, something like thorns, in their anxiety to bear 
grapes; it being possible for people, in the pursuit of even great 
ends, to become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit and 
temper, thus diminishing the sum of perfection in the world, at its 
very sources. We understand this when it is a question of mean, 
or of intensely selfish ends — of Grandet, or Javert. We think 
it bad morality to say that the end justifies the means, and we know 
how false to all higher conceptions of the religious life is the type 
of one who is ready to do evil that good may come. We contrast 
with such dark, mistaken eagerness, a type like that of Saint Cather- 
ine of Siena, who made the means to her ends so attractive, that 
she has won for herself an undying place in the House Beautiful, 
not by her rectitude of soul only, but by its "fairness " — by those 
quite different qualities which commend themselves to the poet 
and the artist. 

Yet, for most of us, the conception of means and ends covers 
the whole of life, and is the exclusive type or figure under which 
we represent our lives to ourselves. Such a figure, reducing all 
things to machinery, though it has on its side the authority of that 
old Greek moralist who has fixed for succeeding generations the 
outline of the theory of right living, is too like a mere picture or 
description of men's lives as we actually find them, to be the basis 
of the higher ethics. It covers the meanness of men's daily lives, 
and much of the dexterity and the vigour with which they pursue 
what may seem to them the good of themselves or of others ; but 
not the intangible perfection of those whose ideal is rather in being 
than in doing — not those manners which are, in the deepest as in 
the simplest sense, morals, and without which one cannot so 
much as offer a cup of water to a poor man without offence — not 
the part of "antique Rachel," sitting in the company of Beatrice; 



124 WALTER PATER 

and even the moralist might well endeavour rather to withdraw 
men from the too exclusive consideration of means and ends, in 
life. 

Against this predominance of machinery in our existence, Words- 
worth's poetry, like all great art and poetry, is a continual protest. 
Justify rather the end by the means, it seems to say: whatever 
may become of the fruit, make sure of the flowers and the 
leaves. It was justly said, therefore, by one who had meditated 
very profoundly on the true relation of means to ends in life, and 
on the distinction between what is desirable in itself and what is 
desirable only as machinery, that when the battle which he and his 
friends were waging had been won, the world would need more than 
ever those qualities which Wordsworth was keeping alive and 
nourishing. 1 

That the end of life is not action but contemplation — being 
as distinct from doing — a certain disposition of the mind : is, 
in some shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality. 
In poetry, in art, if you enter into their true spirit at all, you touch 
this principle, in a measure: these, by their very sterility, are a 
type of beholding for the mere joy of beholding. To treat life 
in the spirit of art, is to make life a thing in which means and ends 
are identified: to encourage such treatment, the true moral sig- 
nificance of art and poetry. Wordsworth, and other poets who 
have been like him in ancient or more recent times, are the masters, 
the experts, in this art of impassioned contemplation. Their 
work is, not to teach lessons, or enforce rules, or even to stimulate 
us to noble ends ; but to withdraw the thoughts for a little while 
from the mere machinery of life, to fix them, with appropriate emo- 
tions, on the spectacle of those great facts in man's existence which 
no machinery affects, "on the great and universal passions of men, 
the most general and interesting of their occupations, and the 
entire world of nature," — on "the operations of the elements 
and the appearances of the visible universe, on storm and sun- 
shine, on the revolutions of the seasons, on cold and heat, on loss 
of friends and kindred, on injuries and resentments, on gratitude 
and hope, on fear and sorrow." To witness this spectacle with 
appropriate emotions is the aim of all culture ; and of these emo- 
tions poetry like Wordsworth's is a great nourisher and stimulant. 
He sees nature full of sentiment and excitement ; he sees men and 

1 See an interesting paper by Mr. John Morley, on "The Death of Mr. Mill," 
Fortnightly Review, June, 1873. 



WORDSWORTH 12 5 

women as parts of nature, passionate, excited, in strange grouping 
and connection with the grandeur and beauty of the natural world : 
— images, in his own words, "of man suffering, amid awful 
forms and powers." 

Such is the figure of the more powerful and original poet, hidden 
away, in part, under those weaker elements in Wordsworth's 
poetry, which for some minds determine their entire character; 
a poet somewhat bolder and more passionate than might at first 
sight be supposed, but not too bold for true poetical taste ; an un- 
impassioned writer, you might sometimes fancy, yet thinking the 
chief aim, in life and art alike, to be a certain deep emotion; 
seeking most often the great elementary passions in lowly places; 
having at least this condition of all impassioned work, that he aims 
always at an absolute sincerity of feeling and diction, so that he is 
the true forerunner of the deepest and most passionate poetry of 
our own day; yet going back also, with something of a protest 
against the conventional fervour of much of the poetry popular in 
his own time, to those older English poets, whose unconscious like- 
ness often comes out in him. 



VII 

JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 
(1856) 

POE 

[First published in Our Corner in 1885. Reprinted in New Essays towards 
a Critical Method, John Lane, The Bodley Head, London and New York, 
1897. Here printed with the permission and through the courtesy of the 
John Lane Company. The footnotes, for the most part, belong to the later 
edition.] 



Since all literary cases must be periodically rejudged, each gen- 
eration's opinions on any phase of the past being part of its special 
relation to things, it is strictly as needless to justify the plea for a 
fresh trial in any one case as it is vain to deny it. Demurrers have 
been too often made to leave any difficulty about their rebuttal. 
Evolution is become a name potent to put down the most obstreper- 
ous conservative in criticism. It is involved in that law, however, 
that we shall all of us continue to have our particular leanings, 
and that some problems will peculiarly appeal to the general mind 
at given junctures. And while it is part of the here-ensuing argu- 
ment that less than due hearing as well as less than justice has been 
granted in the case of Edgar Allan Poe, it is probably true that to- 
day even more than ever men feel the fascination of the general 
problem falling under his name. 

Just because of its fascination, indeed, the Poe problem has been 
less methodically handled than most. Its aspects are so bizarre 
that critics have been more concerned to declare as much than to 
sum them up with scientific exactitude. First the ear of the world 
was won with a biography unparalleled in literature for its calcu- 
lated calumny, a slander so comprehensive and so circumstantial 

126 



POE 127 

that to this day perhaps most people who have heard of Poe regard 
him as what he himself called "that monstrum horrendum, 1 an 
unprincipled man of genius," with almost no moral virtue and lack- 
ing almost no vice. It was an ex-clergyman, Griswold, who 
launched the legend ; and another clergyman, Gilfillan, improved 
on it to the extent of suggesting that the poet broke his wife's 
heart so as to be able to write a poem about her. The average 
mind being, however, a little less ready than the clerical to believe 
and utter evil, there at length grew up a body of vindication which 
for instructed readers has displaced the sinister myth of the early 
records. Vindication, as it happened, began immediately on the 
publication of Griswold's memoir; only, the slander had the pres- 
tige of book form, and of the copyright edition of Poe's works, 
while the defence was at first confined to newspapers; hence an 
immense start for the former : but at length generous zeal triumphed 
to the extent of creating an almost stainless effigy of the poet — 
stainless save for the constitutional flaw which was confessed only 
to claim for it a human pity, and the faults of tone and temper 
which came of nervous malady and undue toil. Then there came 
a reaction, the facts were more closely studied and more unsym- 
pathetically pronounced upon ; the unsleeping ill-will towards the 
poet's name in his own country still had the literary field and fa- 
vour, and the last and most ambitious edition of his works is super- 
vised by a none too friendly critic. 2 Good and temperate criticism 
has been forthcoming between whiles ; but there is still room, one 
fancies, for an impartial re-statement of the facts. 

"It would seem," writes Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, the Ameri- 
can poetess, sometime the fiancee of Poe, and one of the vindicators 
of his memory, "it would seem that the true point of view from 
which his genius should be regarded has yet to be sought." 3 The 
full force of that observation, perhaps, cannot be felt unless it be 
read in context with some of the sentences in which Mrs. Whit- 
man sets forth her own point of view : — 

"Wanting in that supreme central force or faculty of the mind, whose func- 
tion is a God-conscious and God-adoring faith, Edgar Poe sought earnestly 
and conscientiously for such solution of the great problems of thought as 
were alone attainable to an intellect hurled from its balance by the abnormal 
preponderance of the analytical and imaginative faculties." 

1 [Horrible monster.] 

2 This holds true, unfortunately, of the still later complete edition, by Messrs. 
Stedman and Woodberry. 

3 Edgar Poe and his Critics, p. 59. 



128 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

"These far -wandering comets, not less than 'the regular, calm stars,' 
obey a law and follow a pathway that has been marked out for them by in- 
finite Wisdom and essential Love." l 

The theism exemplified in these passages appears to be the 
reigning religion in the United States, and is doubtless common 
enough everywhere else; and it certainly seems sufficiently clear 
that for people whose minds oscillate between conceptions of Poe's 
intellect as hurled from its balance and as wisely guided by a 
loving God who deprived it of the faculty of God-consciousness — 
for such people the ' ' true point of view from which his genius should 
be regarded " must indeed be far to seek. That point of view can 
hardly be one from which you explain the infinite while perplexed 
by the finite; it is to be attained not a priori but a posteriori; that 
is to say, Poe's life and his works have to be studied with an eye, 
not to discovering a scheme of infinite wisdom, or even to finding a 
"point of view," but simply to the noting of the facts and the ar- 
ranging of them. The true point of view is surely that from which 
you see things. 

Much, of course, depends on methods of observation. At the 
outset, we are confronted by the facts that Poe's father married 
imprudently at eighteen, and that the lady was an actress. That is 
either a mere romantic detail or a very important fact, according 
as Poe is regarded as an organism or as an immortal soul. Here 
indeed, the point of view means the seeing or the not seeing of 
certain facts; but as most people to-day have some little faith in 
the operation of heredity, it may be assumed that the significance 
of Poe's parentage is admitted when it is mentioned. Recent inves- 
tigators have come to the conclusion that David Poe was not merely 
romantic and reckless, but given to the hard drinking which was so 
common in the Southern States in his time; and thus, coming of 
a father of intemperate habits and headlong impulses, and of a 
mother whose very profession meant excitement and shaken nerves, 
Poe had before him tremendous probabilities of an erratic career. 
As fate would have it, the man who adopted the little Edgar on 
the death of the young parents (they both died of consumption) 
did everything to aggravate and nothing to counteract the tempera- 
mental flaws of the life he took in charge. We know that Edgar's 
brother, William Henry, who may or may not have been equally 
ill-managed by the friend who adopted him, turned out a clever 
scapegrace and died young; but certain it is that Mr. Allan was 

1 Edgar Poe and his Critics, pp. 33-34, 60. 



POE I29 

no wise guardian to Edgar. The habits of the house were Southern 
and convivial; the clever child was petted, nattered, and spoiled; 
and it seems that Poe might have been made a toper by his sur- 
roundings even if he had no bias that way. Again, Mr. Allan 
was rich, and Poe had no prospective necessities of labour, no 
sense of obligation to be methodical; which makes it the more 
natural that his later life should be a failure financially, and the 
more remarkable that he should exhibit unusual powers of close 
and orderly thought. Finally, the boy's shifting life; his four 
years' schooling in England (where in the opinion of his teacher, 
his guardian did him serious harm by giving him too much pocket- 
money), and later at Richmond; his brief military cadetship at 
West Point, his headlong trip to Europe, and his year's stay there, 
of which nothing seems to be now known, and his studentship at 
the Virginia University — all tended to deprive him of the benefits 
of habit, which might conceivably have been some safeguard against 
his hereditary instability ; and at the same time his training tended 
to develop, though inadequately and at random, his purely intel- 
lectual powers, while supplying him with no moral guidance worth 
mentioning. Such a character required the very wisest manage- 
ment : it had either bad management or none. It was therefore 
only too natural that the youth should be self-willed and insubor- 
dinate at West Point, and much given to gambling at college. 

The other side of the picture, however, must be kept in view. 
While apparently loosely related to life in respect of the normal 
affections (he seems to have had little communication with his 
brother, no very strong attachment to his sister, and no attachment 
to Mr. Allan), he was very far from being the unfeeling and love- 
less creature he was so long believed to be. He seems to have 
described himself accurately when he wrote of his uncommon and 
invariable tenderness to animals ; and the intensity of his affections 
where they were really called out is revealed by the story of his 
passionate grief on the death of the lady, the mother of one of his 
comrades, who befriended him in schoolboyhood. Abnormal in 
his grief as in the play of all his faculties, and blindly bent even then 
on piercing the mystery of the sepulchre, the boy passed long night 
vigils on her grave, clinging, beyond death, to the first being he had 
learned utterly to love. And an important statement is made as to 
the manner of his marriage by a lady who knew him and his con- 
nections well. 1 The majority of respectable readers, probably, 

1 Art. "Last Days of E. A. Poe," in Scribner's Magazine, March, 1878. 
K 



I30 . JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

have regarded Poe's marriage to his beautiful and penniless young 
cousin as one of his acts of culpable recklessness ; but according to 
the account in question, it was rather a deed of generous devotion. 
He had acted as a boy tutor to Virginia Clemm in her early child- 
hood, and when, after his final rupture with Mr. Allan, he went to 
reside with his aunt, 1 the young girl acquired a worship for him. 
According to this story it was on Mrs. Clemm's impressing on him, 
when he contemplated leaving her house afier being an inmate for 
two years, the absolute absorption of the girl in his existence, that 
he proposed the marriage. She was hardly fourteen, poor child, 
but she was of the precocious Southern blood, and her youth seems 
to have made her mother only the more fearful of the effect of 
separation from her adored cousin. Poe's marriage was on this 
view an act not of free choice but of prompt generosity. Whatever 
the truth may be, he was a very good husband. Devoted as she 
was up to her death, Virginia never gave him the full intellectual 
companionship he would have sought in a wife ; but there is now 
no pretence that he ever showed her the shadow of unkindness, 
and it is admitted that in her last days he was tenderness itself. 
All which is a fair certificate of good domestic disposition, as men 
and poets go. 

What then was there in Poe's life as a whole to justify detraction ? 
When the testimony is fully sifted the discreditable charges are 
found to be : first and chiefly, that he repeatedly gave way to his 
hereditary vice of alcoholism; secondly, that he committed one 
lapse from literary integrity; thirdly, that he was often splenetic 
and sometimes unjust as a critic ; fourthly, that he showed ingrati- 
tude and enmity to some who befriended him. Setting aside his 
youthful passionateness and prodigality, that is now the whole 
serious moral indictment against him. The insinuations and asser- 
tions of Griswold, to the effect that he committed more than one 
gross outrage, are found to be either proven false or wholly without 
proof ; and many of the biographer's aspersions on his disposition 
have been indignantly repudiated by those who knew him well — 
as Mr. G. R. Graham and Mr. N. P. Willis, both of whom em- 
ployed him. As for the alleged ingratitude to unnamed friends, 
it seems only fair to ask whether any such faults, if real, may not 

1 Mr. Ingram says {Life, I, 106-7) that Mrs. Clemm "never did know" where 
Poe went after the rupture (1831); and that "extant correspondence proves" 
that Poe did not live with her in 1831-2, "and, apparently, that he never lived with 
her until after his marriage." 



POE 131 

be attributed to the havoc ultimately wrought in Poe's delicately 
balanced temperament by fits of drinking. 1 Mr. R. H. Stoddard 2 
has given an account of some very singular ill-treatment he re- 
ceived from Poe while the latter edited the Broadway Journal — 
treatment: which at once suggests some degree of cerebral derange- 
ment on Poe's part; and a story told of his resenting a home- 
thrust of criticism by a torrent of curses, goes to create the same 
impression. This was in his latter years, at a time when a thimble- 
ful of sherry could excite him almost to frenzy, and when, accord- 
ing to one hostile writer, he had developed incurable cerebral dis- 
ease. Setting aside the question of his fairness as a critic, which 
will be discussed further on, there remains to be considered his one 
alleged deflection from literary honesty. He did publish under his 
own name a manual of Conchology which apparently incorporated, 
without acknowledgment, passages from a work by Captain Brown 
published in Glasgow; and it is alleged by Griswold, and implied 
by Mr. Stoddard, that-the American book is substantially based on 
Brown's. But there is really no proof of anything like important 
plagiarism, and the slightness of the evidence is very suggestive 
of a weak case. Mr. Stoddard, who exhibits a distinct and not 
altogether unnatural bias_against his subject, prints parallel pas- 
sages which do seemingly amount to " conveyance " ; but he unjus- 
tifiably omits to answer the statement on the other side, that the 
Manual of Conchology was compiled under the supervision of Pro- 
fessor Wyatt; that Poe contributed largely to it; that the pub- 
lishers accordingly wished to use his popular name on the title-page ; 
and that, finally, the book, though corresponding in part to Brown's 
because avowedly based, like that, on the system of Lamarck, 
is essentially an independent compilation. Such is the statement 
of Professor Wyatt, and the matter ought to be easily settled. 3 
What Mr. Stoddard does is to convey the impression that Poe 
copied wholesale, though only a few appropriations are cited. 
Now, whereas naked appropriation of another man's ideas in his 
own wording, in a work of ostensibly original reasoning or imagina- 
tion, must be pronounced a serious act of literary dishonesty, the 

1 In the memoir prefixed to the last edition of Poe's works, it is stated that he 
resorted at times to opium as well as to alcohol; and this seems likely enough. In 
that case there would be all the more risk of bad effects on character. 

2 In his memoir in Widdleton's ed. of Poe, 1880. 

3 See, on this and all other matters concerning Poe, the Life by John H. Ingram, 
a work of painstaking vindication which earns the gratitude of every one interested 
in Poe. The American Life, by W. Gill, is mainly compiled from it. 



132 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

incorporation of some one else's paragraphs or sentences is so com- 
mon a practice among scientific and other compilers, that it may 
reasonably be classed as a conventionally innocent proceeding, 
not even to be likened to those innumerable acts of lax morality 
in commerce for which it is almost idle to denounce any offender 
singly. In any case, Poe never pretended to be doing anything 
more than a compilation, and he had a colleague in the work. For 
the rest, there is ample evidence as to his scrupulous honesty 
and fidelity in his relations with his literary employers; and it is 
not recorded that he ever inflicted loss on any man, any more than 
unkindness on those about him. We sum up, then, that Poe's 
mental and moral balance, delicate by inheritance, was injured by 
the drinking habits into which he repeatedly relapsed ; but that his 
constitution was such that what was to others extremely moderate 
indulgence could be for him disastrous excess. 

Now, it might be argued with almost irresistible force that such 
a case as this is one for pity and not for blame — that a man of 
Poe's heredity and obvious predisposition to brain disease is to be 
looked on in the same spirit as is one who suffers from downright 
hereditary insanity. But, seeing it may be replied that all vices 
are similarly the result of hereditary and brain conditions, and that 
we should either blame all offenders to whom we allow freedom of 
action, or none, I am inclined to rest the defence of Poe on a some- 
what different basis; and to substitute for a deprecatory account 
of his moral disadvantages the assertion that morally he compares 
favourably with the majority of his fellow-creatures. Whether 
that is either a vain paradox or a piece of cynicism let the reader 
judge. 

It is, one sees, the habit of most people, in judging of any char- 
acter in favour of which they are not prejudiced, to try it by the 
standard of an imaginary personage who is without any serious 
fault. The strength of this disposition can be seen at any per- 
formance of a melodrama in a theatre, the great body of the au- 
dience being obviously in strong sympathy with virtues of which 
there is reason to doubt their own general possession ; and strongly 
hostile even to vices which they may fairly be presumed in many 
cases to share. In the phrase of Montesquieu, "mankind, although 
reprobates in detail, are always moralists in gross." As for the 
general disposition to condemn the vices we are not inclined to, 
that may be dismissed as a commonplace. And yet it is one of the 
rarest things to find these facts recognized in conduct. A rational 



POE 133 

moral code is hardly ever to be met with. Intemperance — to 
bring the question to the concrete — may be reduced in common 
with most other vices to an admitted lack of self-control ; but it is 
clearly blamed for some other reason than that it evidences such 
a defect. If a man or woman falls hopelessly in love, however 
abject be the loss of self-command, the average outsider never 
thinks of calling the enamoured one vicious merely on account of 
the extremity of the passion. That, on the contrary, is regarded 
by many people as rather a fine thing. If, again, a man is either 
extremely selfish or extremely prodigal, while he may be censured 
for his fault, he is still held to be less blamable than the mere in- 
temperate drinker. Sometimes the censure passed on the latter is 
justified on the score that his vice impoverishes others ; but this is 
not always so ; and in any case the selfish or ill-natured man and the 
spendthrift may do equal injury to the happiness of others. The 
truth is that the revulsion against the drunkard's vice arises from a 
keen sense of the physical degradation it works in its subject ; and 
how strong and how instinctive this is can be told by many men 
who have contemplated in helpless fury the excesses of relatives 
or dear friends. In these cases severe blame may be justified by 
the feeling that the keenest reprobation is necessary to sting the 
drunkard into moral reaction; but it would be difficult to show 
that when a man is dead it is equitable or reasonable to apply the 
same degree of blame to him in reckoning his relation to his fellows. 
All criticism of dead celebrities should be regulated by two con- 
siderations : first, the risk or absence of risk that omission to cen- 
sure for certain faults may encourage the living to repeat them; 
second, the need or otherwise for resisting any tendency to blame 
certain faults unduly. I confess I can see no other safe or rational 
principle on which to apply, in moral criticism of the dead, the 
general law that men's actions are the outcome of their antecedents 
and environment. If so much be conceded, it must be allowed 
that there is no more need to-day to denounce Poe for his unhappy 
vice than to asperse Charles Lamb — which Carlyle, however, 
has done with the self-righteousness of the chief of Pharisees. No- 
body is likely to be encouraged in tippling by the fact that we speak 
with tender pity of Lamb's failing. The query — 



Who wouldn't take to drink if drink'll 
Make a man like Rip % Van Winkle ? 



is not serious. 



134 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

No one in these days, indeed, does think it necessary to pass 
damnatory sentence on Lamb ; * and the difference between the 
ordinary judgments on Lamb and Poe is a striking sample of the 
capriciousness of average morality. Lamb's weakness for gin is 
regarded as morally on a level with his poor sister's chronic homi- 
cidal mania; and of course, strictly speaking, his misfortune was 
as much a matter of cerebral constitution as hers. But surely if 
Mary Lamb is to be spoken of with pure pity for that during a fit 
of madness she caused the death of her beloved mother, and cer- 
tainly if Charles is to be similarly pitied, we are committed to speak- 
ing gently of such a case as Poe's. Yet people whose feeling for 
Lamb is entirely affectionate speak of Poe with austere disapproval ; 
and I cannot but think that the explanation of this and much other 
asperity towards Poe's memory is the singular quality of his literary 
work, especially of his tales. It has been remarked a hundred 
times that these are unique in literature in their almost complete 
destitution in the moral element, commonly so-called. They are 
one and all studies either of peculiar incident, intellectual processes, 
or strange idiosyncrasy; and the ordinary reader, accustomed in 
fiction to a congenial atmosphere of moral feeling, and to judicial 
contrasts of character such as he sees and makes in actual life, 
becomes chilled and daunted in the eerie regions to which Poe car- 
ries him. The common result seems to be the conclusion that the 
story-teller was lacking in moral feeling; and though every one 
does not give effect to his conclusion as the Rev. Mr. Gilfillan did, 
such a conviction is of course not compatible with sympathy. How 
crudely and cruelly people can act on such semi-instinctive and 
unreasoned judgments is shown in the correspondence between 
Mrs. Whitman and Poe during the period of their engagement. 
"You do not love me," writes Poe passionately, "or you would 
have felt too thorough a sympathy with the sensitiveness of my 
nature to have so wounded me as you have done with this terrible 
passage of your letter — ' How often I have heard it said of you, He 
has great intellectual power, but no principle — no moral sense.'" 
One is disposed to echo the first clause ; but the blow which Poe 
feels so acutely is only one of those moral stupidities of which 
naturally tender-hearted women are capable precisely because 
their moral and affectional sensibilities at times overbalance their 

1 Mr. Birrell, in his essay on Charles Lamb {Obiter Dicta, 2d series, p. 229), 
generously exclaims against some who do bestow on Lamb an odious pity. Save 
in the case of Carlyle, I had not before seen any trace of this. 



POE 135 

common sense. Nothing could be more witlessly and inexcusably 
cruel, and at the same time nothing could be more absurd; for if 
Poe really were without principle any protests of his to the contrary 
could be worth nothing; and if the accusation were false he had 
been ruthlessly insulted to no purpose ; but the cruelty was prob- 
ably unconscious, or nearly so. Poor Mrs. Whitman wrote, as 
lovers will, to extract an assurance which could have no value in 
the eye of reason, but which emotion craved; for the moment 
half believing what she said, but wishing to be disabused of her 
suspicion by a passionate denial. That she obtained. The most 
fortunate thing for a man so impeached would be the pos- 
session of a strong sense of humour, though that might involve 
a coolness of head which would jeopardize the amour. But 
poor Poe, wounded as he was, took God to witness that "With 
the exception of some follies and excesses, which I bitterly la- 
ment, but to which I have been driven by intolerable sorrow, and 
which are hourly committed by others without attracting any no- 
tice whatever, I can call to mind no act of my life which would 
bring a blush to my cheek — or to yours." And after alluding 
to the malignant attacks that had been made on him, for one of 
which he brought a successful libel action, and the enmity he had 
set up by his uncompromising criticisms, he cries : "And you know 
all this — you ask why I have enemies. . . . Forgive me if there 
be bitterness in my tone." On which Mr. Ingram warmly com- 
ments that the man who wrote so must have been sincere. It is 
hardly necessary to urge it. Mrs. Whitman did but echo the idle 
verdict of conventional minds on an abnormal nature. With 
fuller knowledge she wrote after his death that, "so far from being 
selfish or heartless, his devotional fidelity to the memory of those 
he loved would by the world be regarded as fanatical;" 1 and all 
the evidence goes to show that, whatever were his faults of taste 
as a critic, his moral attitude to his fellow-creatures was that of 
one who was, as he claims for himself, quixotically high-minded. 
The truth is, an extensive fallacy underlies the aversion which 
many people have for Poe — the fallacy, namely, of assuming 
that a large share of what is vaguely called moral or human senti- 
ment, in an author or in any one else, implies a security for right 
feeling or conduct; and that the absence of such sentiment from 
an author's fiction, or from any one's talk, implies a tendency to 
wrong-doing. And the same fallacy, I think, lurks under the ob- 

1 Edgar Poe and his Critics, p. 48. 



136 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

servation that Poe's mind, if not immoral, was non-moral. The 
assumption in question is a sentimentality that is discredited by 
accurate observation of life. We know, as a matter of fact, that 
Poe's attachments, once formed, were deep and intensely faithful; 
nothing, for instance, could be closer or lovelier than the tie 
between him and Mrs. Clemm : and his sensitiveness was extreme 
where his affections were concerned, though his friendly employer 
Willis speaks of him as a man who in his business life "never 
smiled or spoke a propitiatory or deprecating word." In fact, 
if Poe's private life be compared with that of Hawthorne before the 
latter's marriage, Poe will seem the man of domestic and sociable 
tendencies, and the other a loveless egoist. His son-in-law tells 
us that Hawthorne had very little intercourse with his mother and 
sisters while living in the same house with them, and that he fre- 
quently had his meals left for him at his locked door. 1 Southey, 
too, saw little of his family. Yet no one shivers over Hawthorne 
and Southey as minds without hearts. 

To return, in a perfectly dispassionate spirit, to Lamb, we see 
that his wealth of kindly sympathy did not save him from alcohol- 
ism; and it could easily be shown that a great many moralists 
have been either gravely immoral characters or unamiable and 
variously objectionable. Many of us have never been able to re- 
gard Dante as a satisfactory personality, with his irrational and 
capriciously cruel code and his general inhumanity; and a good 
many will agree that Carlyle, who was always moralizing, was prone 
to gross injustice, and presents a rather mixed moral spectacle 
in his own life. The slight on Poe's moral nature was first pub- 
lished by the sentimental Griswold, who is proved to have been a 
peculiarly mean and malignant slanderer ; 2 and the moral Mr. 
Gilfillan invented a gross calumny. Run down the list of men of 
genius of modern times who have discussed conduct and human 
nature, and you will find an extremely large proportion against 
whom could be charged blemishes of character and conduct from 

1 Mr. Henry James's Hawthorne, p. 38, citing Mr. Lathrop. 

2 Of Griswold Mr. Ingram writes {Academy, October 13, 1883) that he "bore 
too unsavoury a character for public examination ; but those interested in the sub- 
ject may be referred to his own account (in the British Museum) why he repudiated 
his second wife. Thackeray, having proved him a liar, told him so publicly, 
and would not touch his proffered hand; while Dickens convicted him of fraud, 
and made his employers pay for it." Poe's review of Griswold's Poets and Poetry 
of America shows (imprudently enough) the small esteem in which he held his fu- 
ture biographer, who seems to have made or kept up his acquaintance in order 
to retaliate for the critique in question. 



POE 137 

which Poe was free. The ferocity and fanaticism of Dante, the 
grossness of Chaucer, the hard marital selfishness of Milton, 
the brutality of Luther, the boorishness of Johnson, the ripe self- 
love of Wordsworth, the malice of Pope, the egoism of Goethe, 
the murky and selfish spleen of Carlyle, the bigotry of Southey 

— all these are repellent and anti-social qualities which cannot be 
charged against Edgar Poe. In short, the ideal man of lively 
moral feeling and entirely beneficent conduct, by contrast with 
whom Poe is seen to be an incomplete human being, has never 
existed in flesh and blood; and if we take the rational course of 
striking an average of poor humanity we shall find, as before sub- 
mitted, that our subject does not fall below it. We may even go 
further. In regard to the widespread and false notion that Poe 
was a libertine, we may indorse the assertion of Mr. Stedman 
"that professional men and artists, in spite of a vulgar belief to the 
contrary, are purity itself compared with men engaged in business, 
and idle men of the world." x Let us in fairness confess that the 
average man or woman is likely to be one or other of these things 

— narrow, or bigoted, or cowardly, or fickle, or mean, or gross, 
or faithless, or coldly selfish, or disingenuous, or hard, or slander- 
ous, or recklessly unjust; though one or other of these qualities 
may coexist with generosity, or philanthropy, or probity. If we 
recognize so much, we shall cease to sermonize on Poe's failings; 
and proceed rather to consider how rare and how fine his work was. 

Yet another fallacy, however — to call it by no worse name — 
blocks for some the way to a sound appreciation. One American 
critic, 2 appealing to the prevailing dislike of Poe in the States, has 
grounded a sweeping depreciation of his work on the proposition 
that he was subject to brain epilepsy. On that head, clearly, there 
is no need for friendlier people to wish to make out a negative. 
To begin with, there is independent and unprejudiced testimony 
that Poe suffered from a brain trouble; and whether or not that 
trouble was cerebral epilepsy is a question of detail chiefly impor- 
tant to thoughtful specialists. During the serious illness which fell 
on Poe after his wife's death, Mrs. Clemm's nursing labours were 
shared by a true and valued friend of the little family, Mrs. Marie 
Louise Shew, who was a doctor's only daughter, and had received 
a medical education ; and this lady has written as follows : — ■ 

1 Edgar Allan Poe, p. 92. 

2 Writing in Scribner's Magazine, Vol. X, 1875. 



138 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

" I made my diagnosis, and went to the great Dr. Mott with it. I told him 
that at best, when Mr. Poe was well, his pulse beat only ten regular beats, 
after which it suspended, or intermitted (as doctors say). I decided that in his 
best health he had lesion of one side of the brain, and as he could not bear 
stimulants or tonics, without producing insanity, I did not feel much hope that 
he could be raised up from brain fever brought on by extreme suffering of 
mind and body — actual want and hunger and cold having been borne by 
this heroic husband in order to supply food, medicine, and comforts to his 
dying wife — until exhaustion and lifelessness were so near at every reaction 
of the fever that even sedatives had to be administered with extreme caution." l 

The latter details may be noted as telling us something of Poe's 
moral nature ; the diagnosis as a fairly decisive deliverance on the 
brain question, especially when taken in connection with other 
medical evidence, and testimonies as to the startling effect of a 
mouthful of sherry or even a glass of beer on Poe at times. There 
is altogether good reason to hold that his brain was diseased. But 
what then ? To say nothing of the well-worn saw that great wits 
have their place near the region of madness, biologists 2 have told 
us that cerebral and other disease may intelligibly be and has 
actually been a cause of exceptional intellectual capacity. 3 What 
of Cuvier's hydrocephalus and Keats's precocious maturity ? Even 
scrofula, and worse affections than that, have been maintained or 
surmised to promote cerebration: the formula being that certain 
conditions which are pathologically classed as morbid are psycho- 
logically important though impermanent variations. Cromwell's 
inner life has phenomena in some points analogous to Poe's ; and 
if it comes to epilepsy, we have to reckon with a confident classifica- 
tion of Mahomet among that order of sufferers. Lamb was for 
a time in his youth actually insane. But why multiply cases ? In 
what other instance has it been proposed to make light of a man's 
mental achievements because his brain is known to have been 
flawed? I am not aware that any deliberate attempt was ever 
made to belittle what merits Cowper has, because of his affliction ; 
or that Comte's serious antagonists have ever given countenance to 
a condemnation of his philosophy as a whole on the strength of his 
fit of alienation, even though mad enough passages can easily be 

1 Ingram's Life of Poe, II, 115. 

2 This was written before the thesis of "the insanity of genius" had become 
popular. 

3 The assailant knows as much, for he cites Dr. Maudsley as "very positive in 
his opinion that the world is indebted for a great part of its originality, and for 
certain special forms of intellect, to individuals who _. ._ . have sprung from fami- 
lies in which there is some predisposition to epileptic insanity." But the attack 
is as destitute of coherence as of justice and fitness of tone. 



POE I39 

cited from his works. It has been left for an American, writing 
almost unchallenged by the literary class in Poe's native land, to 
proceed from an argument that Poe was an epileptic to a monstrous 
corollary of unmeasured detraction from almost every species of 
credit he has ever received. 1 Baudelaire, discussing Griswold's 
biography, asked whether in America they have no law against 
letting curs into the cemeteries : and it is hardly going too far to say 
that this latest attack on a great memory would never have had 
even a hearing in a well-ordered literary republic. To discuss 
it in detail would be to concede too much ; but I have thought it 
well to cite the attack with the note that not only has no adequate 
recognition been given in America to Poe's intellectual eminence 
(I exclude the friendly memoirs and vindications), but this ex- 
travagantly wrong-headed denial of it secures the vogue due to a 
true estimate. 

The ill-meant aspersion, let us hope, will after all make for a 
kindlier feeling, among those at least whose good-will a man of 
letters need wish to have for his memory. In any case, it is in- 
credible that any literary reputation should be forever measured 
on such principles as those above glanced at. Whatever be the 
whole explanation of the treatment Poe has received in his own 
country, whether it be his small affinity to the national life or the 
abundance of the ill-will he aroused by pitiless criticism of small 
celebrities, criticism in the States must needs come in time to the 
temperate study of his work and his endowment on their merits. 
What follows is an attempt in that direction. 

1 To show how far malice may go astray in reasoning from misfortune to de- 
merit, it may be worth while to point to the absolute failure of this writer's attempt 
to make Poe's brain trouble a means of discrediting his work. Poe, he tells us, 
passed through three psychological periods: the first, one in which he "seems to 
depend for artistic effect on minuteness of detail," as in the Descent into the Mael- 
strom, The Gold Bug, the Case of Monsieur Valdemar, and Hans Pfaall ("imitated," 
says the writer, with his usual culpable inaccuracy, "from the Moon Hoax"); 
the second, a time of predilection for minute analysis, such as is shown in The 
Mystery of Marie Roget; and the third, a spell of morbid introspection, producing 
such tales as The Fall of the House of Usher. Now, what are the facts ? The last- 
mentioned story was published in 1839; Ligeia — a story in the same "morbid" 
taste — in 1838 ; Berenice, Morella, and Shadow, all productions of the weird order, 
in 1835; Silence in 1838; and the eminently introspective tale of William Wilson 
in 1839; while The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar appeared in 1845; The 
Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841, and Marie Roget in 1842. Thus we have the 
works of "morbid introspection" before the specifically cited studies in minute de- 
tail and minute analysis — the Usher story before the Marie Roget and the Valde- 
mar ; and such a production as Morella almost contemporary with Hans Pfaall. 
The theory of development breaks down at every point. 



140 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 



II 

It is worthy of note that fully nine-tenths of the criticism passed 
on Poe, appreciative and otherwise, has been directed to his small 
body of poetry. The fact serves at once to prove the one-sidedness 
of the average literary man and the range of Poe's power. He had 
a working knowledge of astronomy, of navigation, of mechanics, 
and of physics; he certainly compiled a manual of conchology, 
and had at least dipped into entomology; he could work out 
ciphers in half a dozen languages ; he delighted in progressions of 
close and sustained reasoning ; he had a decided capacity for logic 
and philosophy; he eagerly followed and easily assimilated, or 
even in part anticipated, the modern physical theories of the uni- 
verse ; he was a keen and scientific literary critic ; and in addition 
to all this he produced some of the most remarkable imaginative 
writing and some of the finest poetry of the century. But his 
critics have been, with very few exceptions, men of purely literary 
equipment; verse-writers and bellettrists and story-tellers, who 
judge only verse and prose and character. Sharing their depriva- 
tions, I have gone through most of their writings on the watch for 
an estimate of the scientific and constructive capacity shown in 
certain of the Tales, and have found an almost unanimous and 
doubtless judicious silence on the subject. An occasional non- 
committal phrase about the Eureka, and a few generalities on the 
scientific element in the Tales, represent the critical commentary 
on the ratiocinative side of Poe's intellect. Now, to treat his verse 
as his most significant product is to ignore half his remarkableness, 
and to miss those kinds of strength and eminence in his mind which 
most effectively outweigh the flaws of his character and the occa- 
sional exorbitances of his judgment. Save in his own country, 
indeed, the Tales have had popular recognition enough. Poe's 
countrymen never bought up Griswold's edition of his works, and 
have till quite recently been without a complete collection of them ; 
but Mr. Gill has calculated that while the poems are five-fold 
more popular in England than in America, the stories are even 
more widely admired among us; and they have been thoroughly 
naturalized in France in a complete and admirable translation, 
chiefly by Baudelaire; besides being reproduced to a greater or 
less extent in nearly every other European language. Seeing that 
they were eagerly read on their first appearance in America, it 



FOE 141 

must be assumed that, as Mr. Gill suggests, the public there 
were scared off by Griswold's slanders and the consequent myth. 
But if, with all this European vogue for the Tales, critics continue 
to descant chiefly on the poetry, the inference as to its impressive 
quality is irresistible. 

Perhaps by reason of the sub-rational tendency to disparage 
specially an author of one's own country who is loudly praised by 
foreigners, some living American writers have spoken with absolute 
contempt of Poe's poetry. Mr. Henry James, for instance, has a 
strange phrase about his "very valueless verses"; 1 and Mr. 
Stoddard's strongest feeling in the matter appears to be an aversion 
to the refrains — perhaps not an unnatural attitude towards Poe 
on the part of a critic who believes a poet may have too much art. 
In these circumstances it may still be expedient to follow Mr. 
Stedman in bearing witness to the quality of Poe's poetry. It is 
perhaps true, as has been said by Oliver Wendell Holmes, that 
there is almost no poet between whose best and worst verse there 
is a wider disparity ; but that is rather by reason of the fineness of 
the good than of the badness of the bad ; and the latter, in any case, 
consists simply of the long poems of Poe's youth — Al Aaraaf, 
Tamerlane, and the Scenes from Politian. Mr. Lang, in editing 
the whole, has not scrupled to indicate his feeling that these are 
hardly worth reading; and while one feels that in that view per- 
haps the proper course were not to edit them, so much may be 
conceded. In regard to some of the successful poems, again, 
there is to be reckoned with the disenchanting effect of extreme 
popularity; an influence of the most baffling sort, often blurring 
one's critical impression in a way for which there is hardly any 
remedy. The choicest air, as it had once seemed, may be made to 
acquire associations of the barrel organ; and it may ultimately 
become a fine question whether it was not a vice in it to be so asso- 
ciable. One may brazen out one's early attachment, as, I fancy, 
Mr. Arnold did when he lately insisted that Lucy Gray was a 
"beautiful success " ; but when loyalty to an old opinion is justified 
merely by its survival, criticism is turned out of doors. So that, 
lest we are insidiously led into committing the unpardonable 

1 In the essay on Baudelaire in the volume French Poets and Novelists, ed. 1878, 
p. 76. Since this essay was first printed I find that in the Tauchnitz edition of his 
book Mr. James has altered "valueless" to "superficial." I let my criticism 
(infra) stand as it was written, only pointing out that the change of epithet is sig- 
nificant of weakness of ground, and that the second form is even worse than the 
first. When was verse so aspersed before? 



142 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

critical sin of certificating popular poetry by its popularity, it will 
be well to consider briefly in the concrete the merits of The Raven. 
Many of us, I suspect, have at one time developed a suspicion 
that that much-recited work is not poetry of the first order ; and the 
suspicion is deepened when we reflect that the distinction of learn- 
ing it by heart in our youth was conferred on it in common with 
other works as to which there can now be no critical dubiety. 
It is difficult to gainsay Mr. Lang when he impugns its right, and 
that of Lenore, to the highest poetical honours: both poems, like 
The Bells, have a certain smell of the lamp, an air of compilation, 
a suspicion of the inorganic. And yet a studious rereading of 
The Raven may awaken some remorse for such detractions. Not 
only has it that impressiveness of central conception which is 
never lacking in Poe's serious work, but it is really a memorable 
piece of technique. It is hardly possible to say where inspiration 
lacks and mechanism intervenes: the poem is an effective unity. 
Some hold that the touches of plagiarism — the "uncertain " sound 
of the "purple curtain," and the collocation of "desolate" and 
"desert land," both echoes from Mrs. Browning's Lady Geraldine 1 
— serve to discredit the whole; but that is surely false criticism. 
The problem is, whether the appropriations are assimilated; and 
they clearly are. Mrs. Browning herself expressed the com- 
manding individuality of the work in the phrase "this power 
which is felt." The poem has that distinctive attribute of most of 
Poe's writing, the pregnancy of idea, the compulsive imagination 
which fascinates and dominates the reader. One feels behind it 
a creative and sustaining power, a power as of absolute intellect. 
To feel specifically the impact of this influence, let the reader com- 
pare the poem as a whole with Lady Geraldine' 's Courtship, and 
note how, ample as is the poetess's gift of speech, choice as are 
her harmonies, and fortunate as are many of her lines, there is 
yet a something spasmodic and convulsive pervading the whole, 
a tone of passionate weakness, in full keeping with the hysterical 
character of the girlish hero, which gives a quite fatal emphasis to 
the frequent lapses of expression, these seeming to belong to weak- 
ness and slovenliness ; while in reading The Raven there is hardly 
for a moment room for a disrespectful sensation. The imperious 

1 One of the disputed points as to which there should never have been any 
dispute is the question of priority in these passages. One critic, who imputes 
plagiarisms to Poe, brusquely asserts that Mrs. Browning was the imitator. The 
plain facts are that her poem was published in 1844, and Poe's in 1845, an d that 
Poe admired her poetry greatly. 



POE 143 

brain of the "maker," as the old vernacular would straightfor- 
wardly name him, stamps its authority on every line; and the 
subtle sense of the artist's puissance remains unaffected by the 
despairing avowal of the conclusion. The speaker may sink 
prostrate, but the poem is never shaken in its serene movement 
and marble firmness of front. It has "cette extraordinaire eleva- 
tion, cette exquise delicatesse, cet accent d'immortalite qu' Edgar 
Poe exige de la Muse," * remarked on by Baudelaire ; and nothing 
in the poem is more remarkable than the Apollonian impunity 
with which the poet is able to relax and colloquialize his phraseol- 
ogy. Mrs. Browning could not venture without disaster on such 
an infusion of realism into idealism as the "Sir, said I, or Madam," 
and "the fact is, I was napping:" her Pegasus, in view of his 
habitual weakness of knee, would be felt to have stumbled in such 
a line as : — 

" Though its answer little meaning, little relevancy bore" — 

where Poe sweeps us over by his sheer unswerving intentness on his 
theme. The explanation seems to be that the writer himself is 
without apparent consciousness of artistic fallibility — that he is 
pure intellect addressing an abstract reader; and that, as he never 
seems to strain after words, he has a regal air of having said pre- 
cisely what should be said; so that when we read of "a stately 
raven of the saintly days of yore," we hesitate to impugn the fitness 
of the term. What, then, is it in The Raven that takes it out of 
the first rank of poetry ? Well, then, first, the admixture of simple 
oddity, which is disallowed by Poe's own law that poetry is the 
"rhythmical creation of beauty"; and, second, the decomposa- 
bility of the structure at two points, namely, the factitious rustling 
of the curtains, which have no business to rustle, and the falling 
of the shadow, which has no right to fall. 2 These touches are 
"willed"; and, on reflection, have the effect of obtruding their 
art upon us; whereas the perfect poem must seem homogeneous 
and inevitably what it is. It is sometimes argued that the 
very continuity and clearness of the tale in themselves vitiate 
the work, as dispelling true glamour; and assuredly, though 

1 [That extraordinary elevation, that exquisite delicacy, that accent of immor- 
tality which Edgar Poe demands of the Muse.] 

2 Poe, in a letter given by Mr. Ingram (Life, I, 275), says his idea about the 
light was "the bracket candelabrum affixed against the wall, high up above the 
door and bust, as is often seen in the English palaces ( !), and even in some of 
the better houses of New York." It will not do. 



144 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

it is made apparently certain by Poe's own avowal that The 
Genesis of the Raven was a hoax, 1 there can be little doubt that 
the poem was most carefully put together. But to depreciate a 
work of art on such a ground as that is a quite illicit proceeding. 
Results must be judged on their merits. And, indeed, the mere 
flaws in the rationale of the piece, scarcely perceptible as they are, 
would not in themselves suffice to invalidate it, any more than the 
clear flaw in the logic of the second-last stanza of Keats 's Ode to 
the Nightingale discredits that : they do but accentuate the force 
of the objection to the un-elevated though still dignified tone of the 
stanzas and the consequent narrative stamp on the whole. But 
even in making these admissions, the lover of verse must insist 
on the singular power of the composition; which remains more 
extraordinary than much other work that is more strictly success- 
ful. Poe's second-best verse has a distinction of its own. 

If, then, The Raven is thus dismissed; and if, as must needs be, 
Lenore is pronounced a piece of brilliant mosaic, and The Bells 
is classed as a fine piece of literary architecture rather than a poetic 
creation, we shall have left but a small body of work from which 
to choose our specimens of Poe's fine poetry. But what remains 
will serve. Poe never professed to make poetry his main aim, or 
even an aim at all: it was his " passion"; and what is here con- 
tended is that, many-sided as he was, he had a poetic faculty of the 
highest kind, among other powers which few or no other poets have 
possessed. The decisive credentials of perfect poetry are an or- 
ganic oneness of substance, that substance being of a purer essence 
than ordinary speech; a quality of meaning which pierces to the 
sense without the methodic specification of prose ; and a charm of 
rhythm and phrase which is a boon in itself, permanently recog- 
nizable as such apart from any truth enclosed. These, broadly 
speaking, are the " values" of poetry; and he who says Poe's 
verse is valueless must, I think, be adjudged to be without the poetic 
sense. Mr. James must presumably have meant one of two things : 
either that Poe's poetry conveys no moral teachings or descriptions 
of life and scenery — these constituting the " valuable" element in 
poetry for those to whom its special qualities do not appeal — or 
that its art is commonplace. The first objection need only be con- 
ceived to be dismissed; the second, supposing it to have been 
that intended, which I doubt, would need no answer beyond a few 
quotations. Among Poe's early poems is one To Helen, which he is 
1 Professor Minto, however, declined to believe that it really was so. 



POE 145 

said to have represented as being composed when he was fourteen, 
the Helen, on that view, being supposed to be the lady, mother of 
his school friend, who was kind to the boy, and whose death he so 
passionately mourned. In view at once of Poe's habit of mysti- 
fication and of the nature of the poem, I cannot believe that is the 
true account of the matter. The verses are not those of a boy of 
fourteen. But they were undoubtedly written in Poe's teens, and 
I cite them as constituting one of the most ripely perfect and spir- 
itually charming poems ever written at that or any age : — 

"Helen, thy beauty is to me 

Like those Nicaean barks of yore 
Which gently, o'er a perfumed sea, 
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore 
To his own native shore. 

" On desperate seas long wont to roam, 

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, 
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home, 

To the glory that was Greece, 
And 1 the grandeur that was Rome. 

" Lo ! in yon brilliant window niche, 
How statue-like I see thee stand, 
Thy agate lamp within thy hand — 
Ah, Psyche ! from the regions which 
Are Holy Land!" 

Merely to credit these verses with "Horatian elegance," as some 
admiring critics have done, is to render them scant justice. They 
have not only Horace's fastidiousness of touch (with perhaps the 
single reservation of the unluckily hackneyed " classic face") but 
the transfiguring aerial charm of pure poetry, which is not in 
Horace's line. The two closing lines of the middle stanza have 
passed into the body of choice distillations of language reserved for 
immortality; and there is assuredly nothing more exquisite in its 
kind in English literature than the last stanza. To have written 
such verses is to have done a perfect thing. Turn next to The 
Haunted Palace, an experiment in the perilous field of poetic 

1 Some editions read "To the grandeur." I simply follow that reading which 
best pleases me. It is interesting to know, by the way, that these famous lines, in 
the edition of 1831, ran thus: — ■ 



"To the beauty of fair Greece 
And the grandeur of old Rome.' 



What a transmutation ! 
L 



146 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

allegory. What poet had before essayed that with perfect success ? 
I will not venture to say that no one has ; but I can call to mind no 
instance. According to Griswold, The Haunted Palace is a pla- 
giarism from Longfellow's Beleaguered City, 1 a futile imputation, 
which only serves to help us to a fuller recognition of Poe's success. 
Personally, I have a certain tenderness for The Beleaguered City 
as being one of the first imaginative poems that impressed my 
boyhood; but no prejudice of that sort can hinder any one from 
seeing that the poem is vitiated by its nugatory didacticism — 
the fatal snare of the allegorist. Mr. James, in his Hawthorne, 
appears to think (though this is not clear) that he has caught Poe 
condemning himself in a critical declaration against allegory; 
but I suspect the inconsistency is more apparent than real. Poe 
almost never, so far as I can see, uses allegory for the purpose of 
sustaining a thesis, which is the thing he objects to. The generic 
difference between the allegory of The Haunted Palace and that of 
The Beleaguered City is that the latter is a kind of confused ser- 
mon, while the other is a pure artistic creation — a changing vision 
projected for its own sake and yoked to no " moral." Didactic 
poetry there may be, in a happy imposition of poetic quality on a 
moral truth, which ordinarily gravitates towards prose; but to 
make allegory pointedly didactic is deliberately to impose prose on 
the poetic, and this Poe never does in his poetry proper. He simply 
limns his image and leaves it, a thing of uncontaminated art. The 
Haunted Palace is the allegory of a brain once of royal power, 
shrined in noble features, but at length become a haunt of mad- 
ness — a half-conscious allusion, perhaps, to the poet's own dark 
destiny; but there is no precept, not even a hint of the ethical: 
the strange imagination is unrolled in its terrible beauty, and that 
is all. The singer is a "maker," not a commentator. And then 
the melody and surprise of the verse ! 

"Banners yellow, glorious, golden, 

On its roof did float and flow, 
(This — all this — was in the olden 

Time, long ago) ; 
And every gentle air that dallied, 
In that sweet day, 

Along the ramparts plumed and pallid, 
A winged Odour went away." 

1 The Palace appeared first, April, 1839; the City in November (Ingram's 
Life, I, 160). And. Poe accused Longfellow of imitating him I 



POE 147 

Longfellow could do some things in rhyme and rhythm, but his 
genial talent did not accomplish such singing as this, and as little 
could he compass the serene height of strain which Poe maintains 
with such certainty. 

Every charge of poetic plagiarism against Poe does but estab- 
lish more clearly his utter originality of method. 1 Mrs. Browning 
and Longfellow, whom he is charged with imitating, are themselves 
facile imitators, who, somehow, do not contrive to improve on 
their originals ; but Poe, in the one or two cases in which he really 
copied in his adult period, lent a new value to what he took. Where 
he seems to have adopted ideas from others the transmutation 
is still more striking. A writer already referred to, who is as far 
astray in laying as in denying charges of plagiarism against Poe, 
declares that his Dreamland "palpably paraphrases Lucian's 
Island of Sleep" — meaning, I suppose, the description of the 
Island of Dreams in the True History; and the statement is so far 
true that in Lucian there is a Temple of Night in the Island, and 
that the categories of the dreams include visions of old friends ; but 
to call the poem a paraphrase is absurd. There is all the difference 
of seventeen hundred years of art between the Greek's semi-serious 
fantasy and the profound and magical note of Poe's poem : — 

"By a route obscure and lonely, 
Haunted by ill angels only, 
Where an Eidolon, named Night, 
On a black throne reigns upright, 
I have reached these lands but newly 
From an ultimate dim Thule — 
From a wild, weird clime that lieth sublime, 
Out of Space — out of Time." 

Genius, Mr. Arnold has well said, is mainly an affair of energy; 
and the definition would hold for all the work of Poe, whose crea- 
tions, in the last analysis, are found to draw their power from the 
extraordinary intensity which belonged to his every mental opera- 

1 There is a certain air of Nemesis in these charges against Poe, who was apt 
to be fanatical in imputing plagiarism to others. But it is remarkable that no one 
has ever pointed out that Poe's own excellent definition of poetry, "the rhythmical 
creation of beauty" (Essay on The Poetic Principle), is a condensation of a sen : 
tence by (of all men) Griswold. See Poe's notice of Griswold' s Poets and Poetry of 
America (Ingram's ed. of Works, IV, 315). It may be noted that Poe's treatment 
of Griswold in this notice is remarkably friendly ; and whatever of offence he may 
have given his future biographer in his lecture on the same subject, the latter must 
have been a malignant soul indeed to seek for it, in the face of such amends, the 
vile revenge he subsequently took. 



148 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

tion — an intensity perfectly free of violence. Be his fancy ever 
so shadowy in its inception, he informs it with the impalpable force 
of intellect till it becomes a vision more enduring than brass. There 
is no poet who can so "give to aery nothing a local habitation and 
a name." It was perhaps not so wonderful after all that common- 
place people should shun, as hardly belonging to human clay, the 
personality which brooded out such visions as these : l — 

" Lo ! Death has reared himself a throne 
In a strange city, lying alone 
Far down within the dim West . . . 

"No rays from the Holy Heaven come down 
On the long night-time of that town ; 
But light from out the lurid sea 
Streams up the turrets silently — 
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free — 
Up domes — up spires — up kingly halls — 
Up fanes — up Babylon-like walls — 
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers 
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers — 
Up many and many a marvellous shrine 
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine 
The viol, the violet, and the vine. 

" Resignedly beneath the sky 
The melancholy waters lie. 
So blend the turrets and shadows there 
That all seems pendulous in air, 
While, from a proud tower in the town, 
Death looks gigantically down . . . 

"No swellings tell that winds may be 
Upon some far-off happier sea — 
No heavings hint that winds have been 
On seas less hideously serene." 

With unwaning vividness the unearthly vision burns itself tremor- 
less upon the void, till it is almost with a shudder of relief that the 
spellbound reader cons the close : — 

" And when, amid no earthly moans, 

Down, down that town shall settle hence, 
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, 
Shall do it reverence." 

1 In such poems, and in some of the Tales, it may very well be that opium has 
had some part, as it so clearly had in the happiest inspirations of Coleridge. 



TOE 149 

Perhaps such terrific imaginings can never be taken into common 
favour with healthy dwellers in the sunlit world ; but it is hard to 
understand how any, having studied them, can find them forget- 
able. It cannot for a moment be pretended of these verses, even 
by the sciolists of criticism, that they lack "inspiration" and spon- 
taneity of movement; detraction must seek other ground. We 
find, consequently, that the stress of the hostile attack is turned 
mainly on one poem, in which the poet's customary intension of 
idea appears to lose itself more or less in a dilettantist ringing of 
changes on sound. I have no desire to seem in the least degree to 
stake Poe's reputation on Ulalume, which trenches too far on pure 
mysticism for entire artistic success, and at the same time is marked 
by an undue subordination of meaning to music; but I cannot 
help thinking that the dead set made at that piece is unjustifiable. 
Mr. R. H. Stoddard is exceptionally acrid on the subject. 

"I can perceive," he writes, in a memoir of Poe, "no touch of grief in 
Ulalume, no intellectual sincerity, but a diseased determination to create the 
strange, the remote, and the terrible, and to exhaust ingenuity in order to do 
so. No healthy mind was ever impressed by Ulalume, and no musical sense 
was ever gratified with its measure, which is little beyond a jingle ; and with 
its repetitions, which add to its length without increasing its general effect, 
and which show more conclusively than anything else in the language the 
absurdity of the refrain when it is allowed to run riot, as it does here." l 

Now, this censure is fatally overdone. Mr. Stoddard had on the 
very page before admitted that Ulalume was, "all things consid- 
ered, the most singular poem that [Poe] ever produced, if not, in- 
deed, the most singular poem that anybody ever produced, in com- 
memoration of a dead woman." A critic should know his own 
mind before he begins to write out a judgment. Here we have 
an explicit admission of the extreme remarkableness of a given 
poem; then a denial that it ever "impressed a healthy mind"; 
then an unmeasured allegation that "no musical sense was ever 
gratified" with its musical elements. Let one stanza answer — 
the praise of the star Astarte : — 

"And I said: ' She is warmer than Dian; 
She rolls through an ether of sighs — 
She revels in a region of sighs : 
She has seen that the tears are not dry on 

Those cheeks, where the worm never dies, 
And has come past the stars of the Lion 
To point us the path to the skies — 
To the Lethean peace of the skies — 
1 Memoir in Widdleton's ed. of Poe, p. 130. 



150 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

Come up, in despite of the Lion, 

To shine on us with her bright eyes — 
Come up through the lair of the Lion, 

With love in her luminous eyes' " 

Mr. Stoddard must be told that there are some of us who do not 
wish any of these repetitions away, and who think the culminating 
music is closely analogous to effects produced a hundred times by 
Mozart and Schubert and Beethoven, who had all some little gift 
of melody, and were considerably given to the "repetend," as Mr. 
Stedman happily re-christens the so-called refrain. The above- 
quoted stanza is the best, no doubt, and there is one flaw in it, 
namely, the "dry on," which is truly an exhaustion of ingenuity; 
but even here one is struck by the imperial way in which Poe but- 
tresses his lapse with the whole serene muster of his stanza — so 
curiously different a procedure from the fashion in which Mr. 
Swinburne, for instance, or even Mr. Browning, scoops a rhyme- 
borne figure into his verse and, consciously hurrying on, leaves it, 
in its glaring irrelevance, to put the whole out of countenance. 
Poe's few deflections from purity of style are dominated by his 
habitual severity of form. As for the charge of insincerity, it is 
enough to say that it has been brought against every poet who has 
artistically expressed a grief; it being impossible for some people 
to realize that art feeds on deep feelings, not at the moment of their 
first freshness, but when revived in memory. A more reasonable ob- 
jection is brought against Ulalume on the score of its obscurity; but 
that too is exaggerated; and the announcement of one critic that 
it is a "vagary of mere words," of an "elaborate emptiness," is an 
avowal of defective intelligence. The meaning of the poem is this : 
the poet has fallen into a revery in the darkness ; and his brain — 
the critic says it was then a tottering brain — is carrying on a kind 
of dual consciousness, compounded of a perception of the blessed 
peace of the night and a vague, heavy sense of his abiding grief, 
which has for the moment drifted into the background. In this 
condition he does what probably most of us have done in connection 
with a minor trouble — dreamily asks himself, "What was the 
shadow that was brooding on my mind, just a little while ago?" 
and then muses, "If I have forgotten it, why should I wilfully re- 
vive my pain, instead of inhaling peace while I may?" This, I 
maintain, is a not uncommon experience in fatigued states of the 
brain; the specialty in Poe's case being that the temporarily sus- 
pended ache is the woe of a bereavement — a kind of woe which, 



POE 151 

after a certain time, however sincere, ceases to be constant, and 
begins to be intermittent. The Psyche is the obscure whisper of 
the tired heart, the suspended memory, that will not be wholly 
appeased with the beauty of the night and the stars ; and the poet 
has but cast into a mystical dialogue the interplay of the waking 
and the half-sleeping sense, which goes on till some cypress, some 
symbol of the grave, flashes its deadly message on the shrinking 
soul, and grief leaps into full supremacy. Supposing Poe's brain 
to have been undergoing a worsening disease in his later days, 
this its last melody has even a more deeply pathetic interest than 
belongs to the theme. 

Take finally, as still further test of Poe's poetic gift, the poems 
El Dorado, Annabel Lee, and For Annie, The first is a brief alle- 
gory, with something of a moral, but a moral too pessimistic, to 
have any ethically utilitarian quality; the second a lovely ballad 
enshrining the memory of his married life; the third a strange 
song, impersonally addressed to one of the women to whom he 
transiently turned in his lonesome latter years — a wonderful 
lullaby in which a dead man is made placidly to exult in his release 
from life and pain, and in the single remaining thought of the 
presence of his beloved. In these poems we have the final proof 
of the inborn singing faculty of Poe. Some of his pieces, as has 
been already admitted, are works of constructive skill rather than 
outpourings of lyric fulness ; and such a musical stanza as this : — 

"And all my days are trances, 

And all my nightly dreams 
Are where thy dark eye glances, 

And where thy footstep gleams — 
In what ethereal dances ! 

By what eternal streams !" — 

has perhaps a certain stamp of compilation. But no unprejudiced 
reader, I think, will fail to discern in the three poems last named 
a quite unsurpassable limpidity of expression. They evolve as if 
of their own accord. In El Dorado the one central rhyme is reiter- 
ated with a perfect simplicity; Annabel Lee is almost careless in its 
childlike directness of phrase; and For Annie is almost bald in its 
beginning. But I know little in the way of easeful word music 
that will compare with this : — 

" And oh ! of all tortures 
That torture the worst 
Has abated — the terrible 
Torture of thirst, 



152 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

For the napthaline river 

Of Passion accurst : 
I have drunk of a water 

That quenches all thirst : 

" Of a water that flows, 

With a lullaby sound, 
From a spring but a very few 

Feet under ground — 
From a cavern not very far 

Down under ground. 

" And ah ! let it never 

Be foolishly said 
That my room it is gloomy, 

And narrow my bed; 
For man never slept 

In a different bed ; 
And to sleep, you must slumber 

In just such a bed. 

"My tantalized spirit 

Here blandly reposes 
Forgetting, or never 

Regretting its roses — 
Its old agitations 

Of myrtles and roses : 

"For now, while so quietly 

Lying, it fancies 
A holier odour 

About it, of pansies — 
A rosemary odour 

Commingled with pansies — 
With rue and the beautiful 

Puritan pansies." 

Is there not here that crowning quality of emotional plenitude 
which, with perfection of form, makes great poetry as distinguished 
from fine verse: are there not here, in another guise, the urgent 
throb and brooding pregnancy which give to an andante of Bee- 
thoven its deep constraining power ? We have all certain passional 
or sub-judicial preferences in our favourite poetry, setting one 
masterpiece above others for some subtle magnetism it works on 
us, we do not quite know how or why. "Huysmans," says a 
writer of ardently eclectic taste, "goes to my soul like a gold orna- 
ment of Byzantine workmanship." * Somewhat so might one ex- 

1 Mr. George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man, p. 299. 



POE 153 

press the mastering charm of those incomparably simple yet flaw- 
lessly rhythmical lines. 

Ill 

These few extracts are enough to show that as a poet Poe has a 
commanding distinction; but if we find him remarkable in that 
regard, what shall we say of the range and calibre of the mind 
which produced the manifold achievement of his prose ? The more 
one wanders through that, out of all comparison the more extensive 
part of his work, the more singular appear those estimates of the 
man which treat him merely as a poet of unhappy life and morbid 
imagination. Perhaps it is that in all seriousness the literary 
world inclines to Mr. Swinburne's conviction that poets as such are 
the guardian angels of mankind, and all other mind-workers their 
mere satellites ; perhaps that, despite Goethe's services to biology, 
it has a hereditary difficulty in conceiving a poet as an effective 
intelligence in any other walk than that of his art, and accordingly 
excludes instinctively from view whatever tends to raise the point. 
Or is it that the sense of the abnormality of feeling in Poe's verse, 
and in his best-known stories, gives rise to a vague notion that his 
performances in the line of normal thought can be of no serious 
account ? It is difficult to decide ; but certain it is that most of his 
critics have either by restrictedness of view or positive misjudg- 
ment done him serious wrong. 

It is Mr. Henry James who, in a passage already quoted from, 
makes the remark: "With all due respect to the very original 
genius of the author of the Tales of Mystery, it seems to me that 
to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to 
lack seriousness oneself. An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of 
a decidedly primitive stage of reflection." One cannot guess 
with any confidence as to the precise "degree of seriousness" 
which Mr. James would concede; or how much seriousness he 
brings to bear on any of his own attachments ; or what the stage 
of reflection was at which he cultivated an enthusiasm for, say, 
Theophile Gautier. One therefore hesitates to put oneself in 
competition with Mr. James in the matter of seriousness of char- 
acter. But one may venture to suggest that the above passage 
throws some light on the rather puzzling habit of depreciation 
of Poe among American men of letters. Themselves given 
mainly to the study of modern fiction, they seem to measure Poe 



154 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

only as a fictionist; and, even then, instead of fairly weighing 
his work on its merits, they test it by the calibre of the people who 
prefer the Tales of Mystery to novels of character. Remembering 
that as boys they enjoyed Poe when they did not enjoy the novel 
of character, they decide that the writer who thus appeals to 
boyish minds can be of no great intellectual account. This is a 
very fallacious line of reasoning. It would make out Defoe to 
be an artist of the smallest account, though Mr. James has a way 
of connecting intellectual triviality with "very original genius," 
which somewhat confuses the process of inference. It would 
relegate Swift to a rather low standing, because boys notoriously 
enjoy Gulliver's Travels. That result would surely not do. It 
surely does not follow that Mr. Stevenson is intellectually inferior 
to Mr. Howells because the former wrote Treasure Island, beloved 
of boys, while Mr. Howells's books appeal only to people who 
know something of life. The fair, not to say the scientific method, 
surely, is to take an author's total performance, and estimate 
from that his total powers. This, Mr. James has not done, I 
think, as regards Poe, or he would not have written as he has 
done about "seriousness"; and, if one may say such a thing 
without impertinence, the kind of culture specially affected by 
Mr. James is too much in the ascendant among the very intelligent 
reading public of the States. These white-handed students of 
the modern novel are not exactly the people to estimate an endow- 
ment such as Poe's. 1 

If one critical impression can be said to be predominant for 
an attentive reader of Poe's prose, it is perhaps a wondering sense 
of the perfection which may belong to what Lamb called "the 
sanity of true genius," even where the genius borders on the form- 
less, clime we name insanity. This is no idle paradox. What 
I say is that while Poe's work again and again gives evidence of 
a mind tending to alienation, it yet includes a hundred triumphs 
of impeccable reason ; and that for the most part his intellectual 
faculty is sanity itself. It opens up a curious view of things to 
compare the opaque, lethargic, chaotic state of mind which in 
respectable society so securely passes for sanity, with the pure 
electric light, the cloudless clearness, of Poe's intelligence in its 

1 Mr. Howells, it may be remembered, has followed Mr. James in speaking 
slightingly of Poe; and, indeed, the general current of American criticism is still 
in that direction. In face of these judgments, which dispose not only of perform- 
ance but of calibre, one is driven to wonder how the writers estimate their own total 
powers, as against Poe's. 



POE 155 

normal state; and to reflect that he has been called mad, and is 
sometimes described as a charlatan. How would his detractors, 
for instance, have compared with Poe in thinking power if they 
had had to deal with such a problem as that of the prima facie 
credibility of the "Moon Hoax," which Poe is falsely accused of 
imitating? The Moon Hoax was a celebrated narrative, the 
work of Mr. Richard Adams Locke, which appeared in the New 
York Sun some three weeks after Poe's Hans Pfaall had been 
published in the Southern Literary Messenger, and which made a 
great sensation at the time. The Moon Story gravely professed 
to describe the inhabitants, animals, vegetation, and scenery of 
the moon, as having been lately made out by Sir John Herschel 
with a new telescope ; while Poe gave a minute narrative, touched 
at points with banter, of a balloon journey to the same orb ; but 
there was little detailed resemblance in the narratives, and Poe 
accepted Mr. Locke's declaration that he had not seen the Adven- 
ture when he concocted his hoax. The point of interest for us 
here is that the hoax was very widely successful; and that Poe 
found it worth while afterwards to show in detail how obvious 
was the imposition, and how easily it should have been seen 
through by intelligent readers. "Not one person in ten," he 
records, "discredited it, and the doubters were chiefly those who 
doubted without being able to say why — the ignorant, those 
uninformed in astronomy — people who would not believe because 
the thing was so novel, so entirely 'out of the usual way.' A grave 
professor of mathematics in a Virginian college told me seriously 
that he had no doubt of the truth of the whole affair ! " Accord- 
ingly, Poe appended to his Hans Pfaall story, on republishing it, 
an analysis of the other story, than which there could not be 
a more luminous exercise of psychological logic. His scientific 
and other knowledge, and his power of scrutiny, enabled him to 
detect a dozen blunders and clumsinesses ; but perhaps the most 
characteristic touch is his remark on the entire absence from the 
narrative of any expression of surprise at a phenomenon which, 
on the assumptions made, must have been part of the discoverer's 
vision — namely, the curious appearance presented by the moon's 
alleged inhabitants, in that their heads would be towards the 
terrestrial gazer, and that they would appear to hang to the moon 
by their feet. The demand for an expression of astonishment 
at this was that of an intelligence which had carried the acti©n 
of imagination to a high pitch of methodic perfection. The pro- 



156 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

cesses of sub-conscious inference which initiate conviction, the 
polarity of average thinking, the elements of evidence, all had 
been pondered and perceived by Poe with an acumen that is as 
singular as most forms of genius. And the result of the demon- 
stration was no mere protraction of subtle introspection, but the 
masterly solution of an abstruse concrete problem. His facility in 
the explication of cypher- writing was astounding: witness his 
triumph over all challengers when he dealt with the subject in a 
Philadelphia journal and in Graham'' 's Magazine; his unravelling 
of a cryptograph in which were employed seven alphabets, with- 
out intervals between the words or even between the lines; and 
his crowning conquest of a cypher so elaborate that no outsider 
succeeded in solving it with the key when Poe offered a reward 
as an inducement. Take, again, the essay on "Maelzel's Chess 
Player," in which he bends his mind on the question whether that 
was or was not an automaton ; examines with an eye like a micro- 
scope the features of the object ; passes in review previous attempts 
at explanation; and evolves with rigorous logic an irresistible 
demonstration that the machine was worked by a man, and of 
the manner of the working. The power to work such a demon- 
stration is as rare, as remarkable, as almost any species of faculty 
that can be named. It is sanity raised to a higher power. Such 
performances, to say nothing of his prediction of the plot of Bar- 
naby Rudge from the opening chapters, should give pause to those 
who incline to the view, indorsed by some respectable critics, 
that there was nothing extraordinary in Poe's feats of analytic 
fiction, seeing that he himself tied the knots he untied. But that 
criticism is invalid on the face of it. Why is Poe so unrivalled 
in his peculiar line if it is so easy to tie and untie complex knots of 
incident, and to forge chains of causation in narrative? Does 
any one ever dream of denying skill in plot-construction to Scribe 
and Sardou because they deliberately lead up to their denouements ? 
Is it the tyro who propounds deep problems in chess, or the school- 
boy who imagines new theorems in geometry? The matter is 
hardly worth discussing. That the author of The Murders in 
the Rue Morgue, The Adventure of Hans Pfaall, and The Mystery 
oj Marie Roget could be a mere intellectual charlatan, differing 
only from his fellows in power of make-believe, is what De Quin- 
cey would call a "fierce impossibility." 

As a narrator and as a thinker Poe has half a dozen excellences 
any one of which would entitle him to fame. The general mind 



POE 



157 



of Europe has been fascinated by his tales; but how far has it 
realized the quality of the work in them? It has for the most 
part read Poe as it has read Alexandre Dumas. Poe, indeed, 
wrote to interest the reading public, and he was far too capable 
an artist not to manage what he wanted; but it was not in his 
nature to produce work merely adequate to the popular demand. 
Hundreds of popular stories are produced and are forgotten, for 
the plain reason that while the writer has somehow succeeded 
in interesting a number of his contemporaries, his work lacks the 
intellectual salt necessary for its preservation to future times. 
Posterity reads it and finds nothing to respect; neither mastery 
of style nor subtlety nor closeness of thought. But Poe's best 
stories have a quality of pure mind, an intensity of intelligized 
imagination, that seems likely to impress men centuries hence 
as much as it did his more competent readers in his own day. 
Even at the present moment, when his genre is almost entirely 
uncultivated, such a hard-headed critic as Professor Minto sums 
up that "there are few English writers of this century whose 
fame is likely to be more enduring. The feelings to which he 
appeals are simple but universal, and he appeals to them with 
a force that has never been surpassed." To that generously 
just verdict I am disposed, however, to offer a partial demurrer, 
in the shape of a suggestion that it is not so much in the univer- 
sality of the "feelings" to which he appeals as in the manifest 
and consummate faculty with which he is seen to frame his appeal, 
that Poe's security of renown really lies. Doubtless many readers 
will, as hitherto, see the narrative and that only; just as Poe 
himself points out that "not one person in ten — nay, not one 
person in five hundred — has, during the perusal of Robinson 
Crusoe, the most remote conception that any particle of genius, 
or even of common talent, has been employed in its creation. 
Men do not look upon it in the light of a literary performance." 
But one fancies that the age of critical reading is evolving, in which, 
notwithstanding a random saying of Poe's own to the contrary, 
men will combine delight in the artist's skill with due suscepti- 
bility to the result. 

Even among those who perceive the immense importance of 
naturalism in fiction, there are, it is to be feared, some who are 
so narrow as to see no value in any work of which the naturalism 
is not that species of absolute realism that, selection apart, is 
substantially contended for by M. Zola, and is variously exempli- 



158 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

fied in his and other modern novels of different countries and 
correspondingly different flavours. Now, the effective vindication 
of Poe, to my mind, is that, weird and bizarre and abnormal as 
are the themes he affected, he is essentially a realist in his method. 
Granted that he turns away from experience, ordinary or other- 
wise, for his subjects, what could be more perfect than the cir- 
cumspection with which he uses every device of arrangement 
and tone, of omission and suggestion, to give his fiction the air 
of actuality? Take his Hans Pfaall. Hardly any critic, save 
Dr. Landa in his preface to his Spanish translation of some of 
the tales, has done justice to the exactitude and verisimilitude 
with which Poe has there touched in his astronomical, physical, 
and physiological details; and employed them to the point of 
carrying illusion to its possible limit even while he has artistically 
guarded himself from the downright pretence by the fantastic 
fashion of his introduction. There is realism and realism. It 
was Poe's idiosyncrasy as a fictionist to examine, not the inter- 
play of the primary human and social emotions either in the open 
or in half lights, not to be either a Thackeray or a Hawthorne, 
but to trace the sequences and action of the thinking faculty in 
its relation to the leading instincts and feelings of the individual; 
and this he does partly by studying himself and partly by com- 
paring himself with others — precisely the method of ordinary 
humanist fiction. He is always an observer in this direction. 
His objection to the "Moon Hoax" was that it not merely showed 
ignorant blundering in its details but was wanting in proper calcu- 
lation of the attitude of good observers; so in his paper on "Mael- 
zel's Chess Player" he unhesitatingly rejects one of Brewster's 
explanations as assuming too commonplace a stratagem; so, in 
easily unravelling a friend's cypher, he laughs at the "shallow 
artifice" he sees in it; and so in his Parisian stories he derides, 
in the police officer, the cunning which he finds so inferior to 
true sagacity. 

Even the story of The Black Cat is realistic — realistic in the 
very wildness of its action. Any one in reading Poe can see how 
he consciously constructed tales by letting his creative faculty 
follow the line of one of those morbid fancies that probably in 
some degree occur at times to all of us, and of which, alas ! he must 
have had a tremendous share; giving the recapitulation a grue- 
some lifelikeness by vigilant embodiment of the details he had 
noted in following the track of the sinister caprice. And so The 



1 



POE 159 

T ell-Tale Heart, and William Wilson, and The Cask of Amon- 
tillado are realistic — realistic in the sense that they have had a 
psychologic basis in the perversities of a disturbed imagination: 
hence the uncanny fascination of these and other stories of his in 
a similar taste. 1 Whether that particular species of fiction will 
retain a hold on men is a matter on which it would be rash to 
prophesy; and indeed it may be that not only this but another 
class of Poe's productions — that which includes The Fall of the 
House of Usher, Ligeia, The Masque of the Red Death, The As- 
signation, and Berenice — may, as mankind progresses in rational 
culture, lose that peculiar impressiveness they have for so many 
readers to-day. These strange creations, whelmed in shade, 
seem to belong to some wild region, out of the main road of human 
evolution. To my own taste, I confess, they are less decisively 
and permanently impressive than such feats of daylight imagina- 
tion, so to speak, as Arthur Gordon Pym, Hans Pfaall, The Pit 
and the Pendulum, or even The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and 
The Purloined Letter; but there is no overlooking the element 
of power, the intension of idea, which makes itself felt in the twi- 
light studies as in the others. Like every man who has to live 
by steady pen-work, Poe produced some inferior stuff and some 
downright trash ; but wherever his faculty comes at all fully into 
play it puts a unique stamp of intellect on its product, a stamp 
not consisting in mere force of beauty or style, though these are 
involved, but in a steady, unfaltering pressure of the writer's 
thought on the attention of his reader. And when we recognize 
this pregnancy and intensity, and take note that such a critic as 
Mr. Lowell was so impressed by the "serene and sombre beauty" 
of The Fall of the House of Usher as to pronounce it sufficient 
by itself to prove Poe a man of genius and the master of a classic 
style, we shall see cause to doubt whether any considerable portion 
of Poe's imaginative work belongs to the perishable order of 
literature. 

As for the group of tales of the saner type, with their blazing 
vividness and tense compactness of substance — beyond insisting 
on the importance of the capacity implied in these results, and 
the essential realism of the stories within the limits of their species, 
there can be little need to claim for them either attention or praise. 

1 See the Saturday Review of November 28, 1885, for a well-expressed criticism 
to the same effect, published a few weeks after the foregoing, but doubtless by a 
writer who had never seen that. Cp. Hennequin, Ecrivains Francises, pp. 120-130. 



160 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

Their fascination as narratives is felt by all: the only drawback 
is the tendency to argue that, because the non-realistic novel is 
potentially inferior to the realistic, this class of story is inferior 
to the realistic novel or story of ordinary life. To reason so is 
to confuse types. Lytton is a worse novelist than Thackeray 
because, professing both explicitly and implicitly to portray char- 
acter and society, he is less true in every respect ; and the idealistic 
element in George Eliot is of less value than her work of observa- 
tion because it claims acceptance on the same footing while its 
title is, in the terms of the case, awanting. Here we are dealing 
with comparable things, with performances to be judged in rela- 
tion to each other. But in Poe we deal with quite a different 
species of art. That familiar objection to his tales on the score 
of their lack of human or moral colour, expressed by Mr. Lowell, 
in his Fable for Critics, in the phrase "somehow the heart seems 
squeezed out by the mind," is the extension of the confusion into 
downright injustice. It lies on the face of his work that Poe 
never aims at reproducing every-day life and society, with its 
multitude of minute character-phenomena forming wholes for 
artistic contemplation, but — to put it formally — at working 
out certain applications and phases of the faculties of reflection 
and volition, as conditioning and conditioned by abnormal ten- 
dencies and incidents. He does not seek or profess to draw 
" character" in the sense in which Dickens or Balzac does; he 
has almost nothing to do with local colour or sub-divisions of 
type ; his fisherman in The Descent into the Maelstrom is an un- 
specialized intelligent person; Arthur Gordon Pym similarly is 
simply an observing, reasoning, and energizing individual who 
goes through and notes certain experiences : in short, these person- 
ages are abstractions of one aspect of Poe. 1 On the other hand, 
Usher and the speakers in The Black Cat and The Imp of the 
Perverse merely represent a reversal of the formula; peculiar 
idiosyncrasy in their case being made the basis of incident, whereas 
in the others pure incident or mystery was made the motive. No 
matter which element predominates, normal character study is 
excluded; Poe's bias, as we said, being toward analysis or syn- 
thesis of processes of applied reason and psychal idiosyncrasy, 
not to reproduction of the light and shade of life pitched on the 

1 The unfinished Journal of Julius Rodman (published in Mr. Ingram's edition 
de luxe of the tales and poems) presents us with a somewhat more individualized 
type, but there too the interest centres in the incidents. 



poe 161 

everyday plane. It was not that he was without eye for that. 
On the contrary, his criticisms show he had a sound taste in the 
novel proper; and we find him rather critically alert than other- 
wise in his social relation to the personalities about him. It was 
that his artistic bent lay in another direction. 

As a tale-teller, then, he is to be summed up as having worked in 
his special line with the same extraordinary creative energy and 
intellectual mastery as distinguish his verse ; giving us narratives 
"of imagination all compact," yet instinct with life in every detail 
and particle, no matter how strange, how aloof from common 
things, may be the theme. As Dr. Landa remarks, he has been 
the first story-writer to exploit the field of science in the depart- 
ment of the marvellous ; and he has further been the first to exploit 
the marvellous in morbid psychology with scientific art. These 
are achievements as commanding, as significant of genius, as the 
most distinguished success in any of the commoner walks of fiction ; 
and a contrary view is reasonably to be described as a fanatical 
development of an artistic doctrine perfectly sound and of vital 
importance in its right application, but liable, like other cults, 
to incur reaction when carried to extremes. After The Idiot 
Boy and The Prelude came The Lady of Shalott and the Idylls 
of the King; after Trollope came King Romance again; and 
even if Poe were eclipsed for a time, posterity would still be to 
reckon with. 

IV 

There is still to be considered, if we would measure Poe com- 
pletely, his work in the fields of abstract aesthetics, criticism, and 
philosophy; and to some of us that aspect of him is not less re- 
markable than his artistic expression of himself in verse and 
fiction. Even among his admirers, however, this is not the pre- 
vailing attitude. Thus Mr. Ingram, to whose untiring and devoted 
labour is mainly due the vindication of Poe's memory, considers 
that criticism was "hardly his forte"; and Dr. William Hand 
Browne, who, in his article in the Baltimore New Eclectic Maga- 
zine on " Poe's Eureka and Recent Scientific Speculations," has 
been the first bearer of testimony to the poet's capacity as a thinker 
— even this independent eulogist thinks it necessary to declare 
that in Poe's Rationale of Verse, "in connection with just and 
original remarks on English versification, of which he was a 

M 



162 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

master, we find a tissue of the merest absurdity about the classical 
measures, of which he knew nothing." I cannot agree to the 
implications of Mr. Ingram's phrase, and I cannot but think 
that Dr. Browne has spoken recklessly as to Poe's knowledge 
and criticism of the so-called "classical measures," treating that 
question very much as other critics have treated the Eureka. 
That Poe in his school days was a good Latinist we know from 
one of his schoolfellows, who dwells especially on the delight with 
which he used to listen to Poe's conning of his favourite pieces in 
Horace. 

The school in question was strong on the Latin side, and it is 
hardly possible that Poe, whatever he might do in Greek, could be 
otherwise than familiar with the orthodox scansions of the classic 
poets, ranking, as he did, as joint dux of the school. 1 In point of 
fact, he won distinctions in both Latin and French at the Univer- 
sity of Virginia, which must surely count for something. 

It requires, indeed, little scholarship to gather from the ordinary 
editions the received metres of Horace and the established scansions 
of the hexameter, which are what Poe puts in evidence in so far as 
he challenges the academic theory of classic verse. These are 
given with strict accuracy. The whole question raised is whether 
they stand by a scientific or by a merely traditional authority ; and 
it is surely a device worthy of a mediaeval schoolman to evade the 
inquiry by a sweeping charge of ignorance. 2 

In just this supercilious fashion have avowedly unfriendly critics 

1 That Poe's general culture was wide and effective it seems unnecessary to con- 
tend here, though some of his critics deny him such credit. His works must speak 
for themselves. It has indeed been pointed out by one critic that the nature of his 
reference to Gresset's Ver-Vert, in The Fall of the House of Usher, shows him to 
have used the title without knowing the poem; and Mrs. Whitman's merely 
forensic rejoinder only shows that she had not read it either. I fancy he may have 
dipped into the poem and noticed such a phrase as "le saint oiseau" or the con- 
cluding lines, and so entirely missed the nature of the narrative. His "stately 
raven of the saintly days of yore" suggests the same chance. But one such mis- 
carriage, whatever be the explanation, cannot destroy the general testimony of 
his so various writings. 

2 The late Sidney Lanier wrote that "the trouble with Poe was, he did not know 
enough. He needed to know a good many more things in order to be a great poet." 
Alas, that is the trouble with all of us, small and great ; and in more ways than one, 
in the subtler sense rather than in the simpler, it holds true of Lanier himself, to 
the point of the statement that he fell ever further short of being a great poet in the 
ratio of the growth of his conviction that he was one, and that his poetry was an 
expression of knowledge. Man of genius as he was, he did not finally succeed 
even in fulfilling his own law of severance between Art and Cleverness. Poe re- 
mains the greater poet because he knew better the function of poetry and its relation 
to truth. 



POE 163 

disparaged Poe on other grounds, passing judgment without 
offering a jot of evidence. One is led to suspect that, while think- 
ing for himself on science, Dr. Browne treated questions of classic 
metre with the unquestioning faith which other people give to the 
propositions of religion. Those who have looked with independent 
interest into the dogmas of classic prosody know that, whether 
right or wrong, Poe was dealing with a subject on which even re- 
putedly "orthodox" opinion is hopelessly confused; and that the 
off-hand language of Dr. Browne pretends a certainty of expert 
authority which does not exist. Certain rules for scanning Greek 
and Latin verse pass current ; but save in respect of nominal ad- 
herence to the arbitrary rules of a given text-book, there is no agree- 
ment among scholars ; and it is safe to say that the traditional lore 
of the schools is a mass of uncomprehended shibboleths, framed 
without understanding and accepted on the same basis. Poe must 
have heard at school and university the ordinary directions for the 
scanning of classic verse. He was singular enough to think them 
out for his own satisfaction, and he thus found there was no satis- 
faction to be had from them. 

What Poe urged on that head is, I venture to think, broadly 
just and well-timed. As he truly said, "there is something in 
' scholarship ' which seduces us into blind worship of Bacon's Idol 
of the Theatre — into irrational deference to antiquity; " x and as a 
matter of fact the prosody of the schools had never any better 
basis than one of Talmudic deduction from verse never scientifically 
studied. The Iliad, as Poe again says, "being taken as a starting- 
point, was made to stand instead of Nature and common sense. 
Upon this poem, in place of facts and deduction from fact, or from 
natural law, were built systems of feet, metres, rhythms, rules — 
rules that contradict each other every five minutes, and for nearly 
all of which there may be found nearly twice as many exceptions 
as examples." The notorious want of hearty enjoyment of ancient 
verse, qua verse, among those who study it, and the naked and 
unashamed unnaturalness of our own enunciation of it, are suffi- 
cient to support Poe's protest against any mere dogmatic retort 
from the pedants; and I apprehend that no open-minded reader 
of his essay will have any difficulty in deciding whether the analytic 
poet or the ordinary scholastic is the better fitted to arrive at what 

1 In this connection note the recent challenge to the traditionist grammarians 
by Mr. Gavin Hamilton in his treatise on the Subjunctive. Edinburgh: Oliver 
and Boyd, 1889. 



164 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

the principles of rhythm really are. Poe seems to have had the 
eccentric taste to try to enjoy his Horace as he enjoyed his Tenny- 
son. But to say this is to say that he undertook an almost hope- 
lessly difficult task, and it would be going too far to say that he has 
succeeded as he thought he did. A full examination of the matter 
must be left to an appendix; but it may here be said that in the 
very act of coming to the conclusion that Poe's simplified system of 
feet in turn breaks down like the old and complex one as an 
anatomy of verse, we are led to acknowledge anew the singular 
originality and energy of his mind. It is no extravagance to say 
that in this matter it is better to err with Poe than to be "right" 
with Dr. Browne, for Poe's error is a brilliant effort to make a new 
system out of the wreck of one which he has rightly discarded, and 
he offers vivid argumentative exposition where academic ortho- 
doxy offers inert and unreasoned rules. In every respect save the 
crowning point of scientific Tightness it is a masterly critical per- 
formance. 1 



The close of the Rationale raises a question which has been 
generally decided against Poe — that as to whether he had any 
humour. Humour of the kind in which American literature is 
specially rich he clearly had not. Such attempts as his X-ing 
a Paragrab have none of the hilarious fun of those grotesque 
exaggerations which form one of the two main features of Ameri- 
can humour ; and of its other constituent of subtle, kindly drollery, 
unembittered jesting at the incongruous in morals or in incidents, 
he can offer us almost as little. The explanation is that in respect 
of temperament he was too unhappily related to American society 
to have any cordial satisfaction in studying it; and that his sense 
of the comic had the warmthlessness and colourlessness of un- 
mitigated reason. One sometimes finds him even pungently 

1 Mr. Stedman, in editing the recent complete edition of Poe's works, has seen 
fit to say that "the Rationale of Verse is a curious discussion of mechanics now well 
enough understood" (Introd. to Vol. VI., p. xiv). As very few of us are conscious 
of Mr. Stedman' s sense of mastery, which he does not give us the means of sharing, 
I leave my Appendix on Accent, Quantity, and Feet to exhibit other people's difficul- 
ties. And when Mr. Stedman further pronounces (p. xv) that "one can rarely 
draw a better contrast between the faulty and the masterly treatment of a literary 
topic than by citing The Rationale of Verse and [Arnold's] three lectures On Trans- 
lating Homer," I must take leave to say that he does but give us an uncritical in- 
dorsement of a prestige. Arnold's book is really a failure as a technical treatise. 



POE 165 

humorous, but it is always in a generalization, or in derision of 
a fallacy or a fatuity; always in a flash of the reason, never in a 
twinkle of the temperament; and only those who are capable of 
what George Eliot once delightedly spoke of as the laughter which 
comes of a satisfaction of the understanding, will perceive that he 
possesses humour at all. His satire, indeed, is strictly in keeping 
with his criticism in general. The peculiar quality of that, which 
for some readers makes it unsuccessful, lies in this absolute su- 
premacy of judgment. The apparent or rather the virtual ruth- 
lessness of much of his critical writing is the outcome of the two 
facts that he had an extremely keen critical sense and that, in 
applying it, save when his emotional side was stimulated, as it 
generally was when he was criticising women, 1 he was sheer, im- 
placable intellect. To him the discrimination of good and bad in 
literature was a matter of the intensest seriousness : of the faculty 
for doing mere "notices" of the mechanically inept and insincere 
sort turned out by so many of the criticasters who moralize about 
his lack of the moral sense — of that convenient aptitude he was 
quite destitute. To represent him, however, in the way Mr. 
Stoddard does, as a kind of literary Red Indian, delighting in the 
use of the tomahawk for its own sake, is but to add to the darkening 
of critical counsel about Poe. The prejudiced critic in question 
speaks as follows : — 

"Like Iago, he was nothing if not critical, and the motto of his self- 
sufficient spirit was Nil admirari. ... It is a weakness incident to youth 
and ambition. ... I do not think that Poe ever outgrew it, or sought to 
outgrow it. He believed that his readers loved havoc; Mr. Burton, on the 
contrary, believed that they loved justice. And he was right, as the criti- 
cisms of Poe have proved, for they have failed to commend themselves to the 
good sense of his countrymen. His narrow but acute mind enabled him to 
detect the verbal faults of those whom he criticised, but it disqualified him 
from perceiving their mental qualities. He mastered the letter, but the 
spirit escaped him. He advanced no critical principle which he established; 
he attacked no critical principle which he overthrew. He broke a few 
butterflies on his wheel ; but he destroyed no reputation. He was a powerless 
iconoclast." 2 

I quote this as the most close-packed, comprehensive, and con- 
sistent piece of aggressively bad criticism by a not incompetent 



See Mr. Stoddard's memoir in Widdleton's edition of Poe, p. 165. "I cannot 
point an arrow against any woman," was one of Poe's private avowals. Still, he 
wrote contemptuously of Margaret Fuller, whom he disliked on both personal and 
literary grounds, as did Mr. Lowell. 
2 Memoir in Widdleton's ed., p. 89. 



l66 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

critic that I remember to have seen. From the malicious, not to say 
malignant, "Like Iago" to the overstrained depreciation of the 
" powerless iconoclast," all is unfair and untrue. The remark 
about " havoc" and Mr. Burton refers to a jesting answer made by 
Mr. Poe to one of his employers who deprecated his severity; an 
answer which to take as an expression of Poe's critical creed is 
discreditably unjust. He thought the severity complained of was 
deserved, and he merely made the light answer by way of soothing 
the uneasiness or silencing the objections of an employer for whose 
judgment he had no respect. To take seriously a phrase so uttered 
is to show either moral pedantry or prejudice. As to the view taken 
of Poe as a critic by the "good sense" of his countrymen, that must 
be left to the decision of the tribunal in question, if it can be got at ; 
and the proposition that Poe's mind was narrow may be profitably 
left alone ; while the other dicta may be best disposed of by laying 
down truer ones. 

What may fairly be said against Poe's criticisms is that they have 
not the absolute artistic balance and completeness, the perfection 
of "form" which belongs to his tales and best poems. Criticism 
was not with him, as it has been said to be with Mr. Lowell and 
Mr. Arnold, a "fine art" ; it was rather a science ; and his critiques 
accordingly are processes of scientific analysis and summing-up, 
almost always restricted in a businesslike manner to the subject in 
hand. What he might have done if he had had the opportunities 
of the two writers named, if he had had academic leisure and good 
media, is a matter for speculation ; but what we do know is that he 
has left a body of widely various criticism which, as such, will better 
stand critical examination to-day than any similar work produced 
in England or America in his time. Mr. James, half -sharing the 
normal American hostility to Poe, thinks that his critical product 
"is probably the most complete specimen of provincialism ever 
prepared for the edification of men " ; though he admits that there 
is mixed in it a great deal of sense and discrimination; and that 
"here and there, sometimes at frequent intervals (sic), we find a 
phrase of happy insight embedded in a patch of the most fatuous 
pedantry." 1 Well, provincialism is a very incalculable thing: 
so Protean and subtle that some people find some of the essence of 
it actually in the very full-blown cosmopolitanism of Mr. James, 
whose delicate narrative art is so much occupied with the delinea- 
tion of aspects of the life of idle Americans in Europe and idle 

1 Hawthorne, p. 64. 



POE 167 

Europeans in America, and so admirably detached from all grosser 
things. Putting that out of the question, and assuming that Mr. 
James is as qualified a critic of criticism in general as he has un- 
doubtedly proved himself to be of the novel, we must in any case 
hold that he did not sufficiently consider the general conditions of 
criticism in Poe's day when he penned his aspersion. When we 
remember how matters stood in England, with Christopher North 
and the youthful Thackeray and Macaulay and the Quarterlies 
representing the critical spirit; x when we note how Carlyle, study- 
ing Blackwood and Frazer in those days, decides that "the grand 
requisite seems to be impudence, and a fearless committing of your- 
self to talk in your drink " ; and when we try to reckon up what of 
insight and real breadth of view there was in all these, we shall 
find it difficult to accept Mr. James's standard. Provincialism is 
a matter of comparison. If it be decided that to deal as minutely 
as Poe did with the contemporary literature and writers of one's 
own country is unwise, the provincialism of the proceeding will 
still be to prove; and in the end a number of things in Poe's 
critical remains go some way to explode the detractions we have 
been considering. Particular judgments apart, there is a general 
pressure of reasoning power in his critical writing which is really 
not to be found in the works of later men, English and American, 
whose title is taken for granted by some of those who make light 
of Poe on this side. The reasoning of Mr. Lowell, outside of the 
field of pure literature or literary art, is always precarious and not 
seldom quite puerile : that of Mr. Arnold, even on points of literary 
effect, is too often trivially and cheaply fallacious; but in Poe, 
though we may find critical caprice and extravagance, the standard 
of ratiocination, the ruling quality of the logic, is always high and 
masculine. And against a few extravagances of praise and dis- 
praise, there are a hundred sure and true verdicts, given long in 
advance of general appreciation. When we look to see what line 
he takes as a critic, we find him delightedly extolling Tennyson as 
a great poet when men were still worshipping devoutly at the shrine 
of Wordsworth ; insisting from the first that the obscure Hawthorne 
was a genius of a far higher order than Longfellow; welcoming 
Dickens as a great artist in the humours of character, but warning 
him that he had no gift of construction ; heartily eulogizing Hood ; 

1 "Macaulay and Dilke and one or two others excepted," writes Poe (Mar- 
ginalia, vii.), "there is not in Great Britain a critic who can fairly be considered 
worthy the name." 



l68 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

giving generous praise to Mr. Home's Orion; denying merit to 
the popular Lever ; pointing out that the still more popular Valen- 
tine Vox was not literature; standing up for fair play to Moore; 
keenly scrutinizing Macaulay; doing homage to Mrs. Browning; 
paying the fullest admiring tribute to the memory of Lamb; 
coolly and impartially analyzing Cooper — always quick to give 
honour where honour was due, and to protest against critical in- 
justice; never once pandering to commercialism or tolerating the 
puffery of the undeserving; never weighting his scales for the 
benefit of any, save perhaps when his idiosyncrasy made him exag- 
gerate the merits of some women-poets. As for the pedantry, one 
may suggest that there are departments of criticism to which Mr. 
James, admirable critic as he is, may be a stranger; and that it is 
yet not pedantry to be at home in these. 

Let us glose nothing: let us admit that in discussing the com- 
monplace quality of Lever, Poe becomes so extravagant in his 
esteem of the kind of fiction to which his own faculty pointed as to 
say that "for one Fouque there are fifty Molieres," and to declare 
that "Mr. Dickens has no more business with the rabble than a 
seraph with a chapeau de bras " — here stultifying a previous utter- 
ance. There is nothing to be said for such deliration as that, of 
course : we can but set it down to the brain-flaw. Nor can it be 
denied that the temper of his writing is often faulty ; that he shows 
"bad form" enough to justify M. Hennequin's use of the word 
"littlenesses." The note, in fact, is often sharply neurotic. But 
at the risk of being charged with neck-or-nothing partisanship, I 
venture hereanent to indorse the phrase of the friendly reviewer 
who pronounced Poe "potentially" one of the greatest of critics. 
It is a perfectly fair distinction. One finds that Poe's critical judg- 
ment was generally unerring; and that he invariably knew and 
told how and why he reached his verdict; and one finds in an 
utterly preposterous misjudgment on his part only a sign of mo- 
mentary distraction. For the comparative bareness of the critical 
part of his work is no argument against his being a great critic. 
Indeed the very faults that are most flagrant in his critical work, the 
stress of temper over small matters and small writers, and the 
pedantic-looking persistence in theoretic analysis, clearly come of 
the spontaneous play of his critical faculty through the medium 
of a flawed nervous system, without check from the other faculties 
of character. Hence the air of "littleness," even of moral defect. 
It was not that, as the wiseacres said, he was without character; 



POE 169 

but that in him certain intellectual faculties were so developed 
as to go to work without control from the character, at least in his 
excited moods. And it was his hard fate that, as a hack journalist, 
he had to write in all moods, and on matters of journalistic attrac- 
tion — a simple economic fact which is strangely disregarded by his 
gainsayers. 1 When he was not nervously excited, again, the very 
strength of his critical faculty tended to make him pronounce 
rigorously technical and unadorned decisions where other men 
would turn out polished and charming essays ; but in the terms of 
the case his work is more truly critical than theirs. The truth is 
that in our literature pure criticism is very scarce. Some of our 
most popular and charming critics, so-called, are rather essayists 
than methodical judges of literature : they write a propos of books 
and authors, giving us in so doing a finished expression of their 
own sentiments and their own philosophy, often laying down sound 
literary opinions and displaying a fine taste ; but leaving us rather 
to echo their conclusions out of esteem for their authority than guid- 
ing us to any science of discrimination on our own account. Writ- 
ing as critics, they are adding to literature rather than effectively 
analyzing it. With Poe it is altogether different. We read his 
criticisms not for their own literary quality but for their judicial 
value and their service to critical science; and though it follows 
that they can never be widely known, it is not unsafe to predict for 
them recognition and interest at a time when a great deal of the 
more "readable" products of modern critics are forgotten. Cer- 
tainly Poe was in advance of his time in the rigour of his critical 
principles. The unrealized ambition of his literary life, the foun- 
dation of a critical journal which should be absolutely honest and 
be written by none but competent critics, giving the reasons for 
all their judgments, was utterly Utopian. Neither the required 
critics nor fit readers then existed or yet exist in America, or for 
that matter in England. Now, as in Poe's day, it may be that the 
qualified craftsmen in the States have to waste their strength in 
miscellaneity ; but however that may be it is certain that American 
criticism, like English, makes but a poor show beside the critical 

1 We have his own anxious avowal in his masterly critique of Bamaby Rudge : 
"From what we have here said, and perhaps said without due deliberation (for, 
alas ! the hurried duties of the journalist preclude it). . . ." The same explana- 
tion will account for the inconsistencies of phrase in the critique on Hawthorne. 
And some of the worst exhibitions in the Broadway^ Journal are to be set down 
to the fact, noted by Mr. Ingram, that Poe had at times to manufacture most of 
the matter for an issue, this when his physique was rapidly running down. 



170 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

literature of France. For illustration, it must suffice here to sug- 
gest a comparison of the graceful and genial essay of Mr. Stedman, 
the best American estimate of Poe, with the article by M. Emile 
Hennequin in the Revue Contemporaine ; x an analytical study 
which, reading it as I do when my own essay is as good as written, 
makes me feel as if my labour were mostly thrown away. M. 
Hennequin, perhaps, would not resent 2 the inference that he has 
learned some lessons of analysis from Poe; who, by the way, per- 
formed as remarkable a feat of analysis in his criticism of Barnaby 
Rudge as in any of his other productions. The decomposition of 
that story, the revelation of the writer's mental processes, and the 
deduction of the plot from the opening chapters, drawing as they 
did from Dickens an inquiry whether his critic had dealings with 
the devil, are things to be remembered in the history of literature. 
But if there were no such achievement to Poe's credit, and if he 
had not written his essay on the American Drama, one of the ablest 
dramatic criticisms ever penned, that body of multifold criticism 
which stands in his works under the title Marginalia would alone 
suffice, to my thinking, to prove him a born critic. Barring some 
follies, some pretentiousness, some intended nonsense, and some 
inexplicable contradictions, which suggest either deliberate mysti- 
fication or mixed authorship, that miscellany of paragraphs and 
essaylets is a perpetual sparkle of clear thought, into which one 
dives time after time, always finding stimulus, even if it be of 
provocation, always buoyantly upborne by the masterful mind. 

But while we find Poe even in his college days making curious 
attempts to " divide his mind" by doing two things at once, and in 
later life musing intently on "the power of words," his thinking 
faculty was not limited to analysis and criticism. It so happens 
that he has given us, in addition to all his artistic and critical work, 
one of the most extraordinary productions of imaginative philo- 
sophic synthesis in literature. The Eureka has, indeed, no socio- 
logical bearing, save in so far as it incidentally throws out the 
suggestion that as "the importance of the development of the ter- 
restrial vitality proceeds equally with the terrestrial condensation," 
we may surmise the stages of the evolution of life to be in terms of 
the variations of the solar influence on the earth, and that the dis- 
charge of a new planet, inferior to Mercury, might freshly modify 
the terrestrial surface so as to produce "a race both materially and 

1 January, 1885; reprinted in the volume Ecrivains Francises. 

2 M. Hennequin, alas! died suddenly in the summer of 1888, in his prime. 



POE 17I 

spiritually superior to Man." The speculation is interesting, but 
remote from everyday interests. A remarkable detail in Poe's 
life and character is that he rarely touches on things political; 
whence, perhaps, an impression that he had no sympathy with 
social movement and aspiration in general. On the strength, pre- 
sumably, of the allusion to mob rule in Some Words with a Mummy, 
and of some sentences in the Colloquy of Monos and Una, Mr. 
Lang * confusedly decides that "If democratic ecstasies are a tissue 
of historical errors and self-complacent content with the common- 
place, no one saw that more clearly than Poe." But the school of 
languid anti-democrats cannot rightfully claim Poe as being on 
their side. If they will read chap. vii. of the Marginalia they will 
find him expressing democratic sentiments in his own person ; and 
in his Fifty Suggestions (not a very satisfactory compilation) they 
will find a remarkable prophetic judgment as to the revolutionary 
spirit in Europe. If further proof is wanted of Poe's essential 
democratism, I would cite the circumstance, not generally known, 
that in the Broadway Journal there appeared, while he was sole 
editor, an article entitled "Art Singing and Heart Singing," signed 
"Walter Whitman," in which are suggested for apparently the first 
time those doctrines as to democratic culture which have since be- 
come so familiar; and that there is the editorial note "It is scarcely 
necessary to add that we agree with our correspondent through- 
out." The fact remains, however, that Poe made no attempt at a 
sociological synthesis. Setting aside the constructive element in 
his tales, it is in his cosmogonic philosophy that we must look for 
the synthetic side of his mind. 



VI 

It resulted from the insistence of the "reasoning reason" in Poe 
that the train of thought which evolved the Eureka found expres- 
sion also in his artistic work, while at the same time the growing 
insurgence of temperament gave an emotional cast to his phi- 
losophy. To say nothing of his psychological tales, we have the 
Colloquy of Monos and Una (as to the alleged plagiarizing in which 
there is not a shadow of evidence) where two souls in heaven look 
back on the finished course of humanity; the Conversation of Eiros 
and Charmian, in which similarly one spirit tells another of how 

1 In the preface to the "Parchment" edition of Poe's poems. 



172 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

the race was destroyed ; and The Power of Words, in which yet 
again two immortals talk of transcendental things. In this last 
dialogue there is a touch which for vastitude of imagination is per- 
haps unmatchable. "Come," says the spirit Agathos to Oinos, 
who is " new-fledged with immortality" — "Come ! we will leave 
to the left the loud harmony of the Pleiades, and sweep outward 
from the throne into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for 
pansies and violets and heart's-ease, are the beds of the triplicate 
and triple-tinted suns." In the way of "brave translunary things " 
it will not be easy to beat that. This is indeed poiesis ; and it was 
perhaps with a true instinct that Poe, flatly contradicting his own 
rule that a poem must be short to be truly poetic, recorded his desire 
that the Eureka, with all its logic and criticism, should be regarded 
as a poem. It is a great, impassioned, imaginative projection, 
beginning in just some such elemental swell of ideal emotion as 
gives birth to poetry. But there could be no greater mistake than 
to regard the Eureka, with its vast cosmogonic sweep, as a mere 
rhapsody. Dr. William Hand Browne, who has made it the sub- 
ject of a sufficiently practical article, finds that its author possessed, 
"in remarkable excellence, the scientific mind." 1 Recognizing 
this, Dr. Browne remarks that it has been Poe's peculiarly hard 
fortune to be not only persistently maligned by his enemies but 
imperfectly estimated by his friends ; a truth which Dr. Browne 
goes on unconsciously to illustrate by denying Poe credit for The 
Gold Bug and The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and, as we have 
seen, by charging him with writing absurdly and ignorantly on 
the classical measures. These injustices, however, perhaps give 
only the more weight to Dr. Browne's eulogy when he attributes to 
Poe "the power of expressing his thoughts, however involved, 
subtle, or profound, with such precision, such lucidity, and withal 
with such simplicity of style, that we hardly know where to look 
for his equal : certainly nowhere among American writers." That 
seems to me quite true; and there could be no better evidence in 
support than the Eureka, which only needs to be separately re- 
printed without its worrying dashes and without italics to rank 
as the most luminous and the most original theistic treatise in the 
language. This verdict may perhaps incur the more suspicion 

1 It is one of the mistakes of Dr. Nordau to exclaim vociferously at M. Morice 
for naming Poe in the same group with Spencer and Claude Bernard (Degeneresence 
French trans, i. 242). Dr. Nordau evidently knows very little about Poe's per- 
formance. 



POE 173 

when I avow that I pass it in the conviction that Poe's reasoning 
breaks down, like all other theistic reasoning, when its conclusion 
is applied to the primary problem. It is the way in which he rea- 
sons up to a conclusion subversive of itself and of all other theisms, 
that makes this treatise unique in philosophy. It is plain, indeed, 
that Poe on his way reasoned himself out of his primary theism 
into an entirely new poly -pantheism; and of course it is a plain 
proof of mental disturbance thus to wander on the path of an 
inquiry. 1 But let the mental overpoise be taken for granted, and 
the intellectual interest of the performance remains. 

At the outset he decides with the most absolute arbitrariness that 
there is a finite "universe of stars," and an infinite "universe of 
space" — a proposition which certainly testifies to his failure to get 
behind the common illusion of space as the antithesis of existence. 
No less arbitrarily does he assume Deity, making none of the popu- 
lar pretences to reach that hypothesis by way of elimination. "As 
our starting-point, then," he writes, "let us adopt the Godhead. 
Of this Godhead in itself, he alone is not imbecile, he alone is not 
impious, who propounds — nothing." 2 But, following the fa- 
miliar, the fatal path of all theology, he will not admit that the in- 
conceivable will be forever unconceived, and, having to begin with 
affirmed its volition, he immediately after affirms that he has some- 
thing else to propound concerning it : — 

"An intuition altogether irresistible, although inexpressible, forces me 
to the conclusion that what God originally created — that that Matter, which, 
by dint of his Volition, he first made from his spirit, or from Nihility ( ! ) 
could have been nothing but matter in its utmost conceivable state of — 
what ? — of Simplicity. This will be found the sole absolute assumption of 
my Discourse." 3 

In other words, "Oneness is all that I predicate of the originally 
created Matter." But "the assuniDtion of absolute Unity in the 
primordial Particle includes that of infinite divisibility," so that we 
yet further assume attraction and repulsion as primal character- 
istics of the universe, the first being its material and the second its 
spiritual principle. 4 "I feel, in a word, that here the God has 
interposed, and here only, because here and here only the knot 

1 It would seem indeed that only in his last years did he begin to pay much at- 
tention to religious problems. His previous attitude seems to have been conven- 
tionally, sometimes even vulgarly, orthodox — a surprising thing in the case of 
such a critical intelligence. 2 Works, Ingram's ed., III. 107. 



174 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

demanded the interposition of the God." x "Attraction and repul- 
sion are matter." Then comes many pages of impassioned brood- 
ing on the conceptions thus set out with, and of quasi-mathematical 
extension of the premises, all leading up anew to the thing assumed 
at the outset — the finitude of the "universe of stars." " Gravity 
exists on account of Matter's having been irradiated, at its origin, 
atomically, into a limited sphere of space, from one, individual, 
unconditional, irrelative and absolute Particle Proper. . . ." 2 
Thus we get rid of "the impossible conception of an infinite exten- 
sion of Matter," and set up the other conception of an "illimitable 
Universe of Vacancy beyond." 3 

But here the poet flinches, as well he might, and we have this 
confession : — 

"Let me declare only that, as an individual, I myself feel impelled to fancy, 
without daring to call it more — that there does exist a limitless succession of 
Universes, more or less similar to that of which we have cognizance — to 
that of which alone we shall ever have cognizance — at the very least until the 
return of our own particular Universe into Unity. If such clusters of clus- 
ters exist, however — and they do — - it is abundantly clear that having no part 
in our origin, they have no portion in our laws. They neither attract us, 
nor we them. Their material, their spirit is not ours, is not that which ob- 
tains in any part of our Universe. They could not impress our senses or 
our souls. . . . Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom oj its 
proper and particular God." 4 

And in the end the proposition is, on the one hand: — 

" That each soul is, in part, its own God, its own Creator ; in a word, that 
God — now exists solely in the diffused matter and Spirit of the Universe ; 
and that the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re- 
constitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God;" 

while, on the other hand, this God is "one of an absolutely infinite 
number of similar Beings that people the absolutely infinite domains 
of the absolutely infinite space. " 5 And yet he had earlier insisted, 
in the spirit of modern Monism, on "the condensation of laws into 
law," and the conclusion that "each law of Nature is dependent 
at all points upon all other laws," 6 a maxim which quashes his 
infinity of irrelated universes and Gods; and again he insisted: 
"That Nature and the God of Nature are distinct, no thinking 

1 Works, Vol. III. p. 113. 2 P. 137. 

3 P. 163. 4 P. 164; italics Poe's. 

6 P. 194. 6 P. 147. 



POE 



*75 



being can doubt " * — a doctrine which quashes his unitary Pan- 
theism. Thus, on his own principle that "a perfect consistency 
can be nothing but an absolute truth," 2 he has definitely missed 
truth. It is the fate of all theosophies. And still his failure, in 
virtue of the mere energy and sustained imaginativeness of its rea- 
soning, is a permanently notable philosophical document — this 
though his neurosis was visibly worsening at the time of the com- 
position to the point of affecting its whole tone, and much of the 
reasoning. Capacity in this kind must be measured comparatively ; 
and it needs neither dissent nor agreement, but simply acquaintance 
with the average run of theistic and cosmological reasoning, to 
come to the opinion that Poe is in these matters as abnormal, as 
intensely intellectual, as he is in everything else. 3 The book — 

1 Works, Vol. III. p. 147. 2 p IOO _ 

3 The very hostile critique of the Eureka by Professor Irving Stringham, re- 
printed in the notes to Vol. IX. of Messrs. Stedman and Woodberry's edition, really 
concedes all that is above claimed for the treatise as an exhibition of intellectual 
power, though denying it all scientific originality and pronouncing the philosophical 
argument the "degrading self-delusion of an arrogant and fatuous mind." This 
is a sample of the language constantly used by American writers towards a man in 
whom brain disease can be diagnosed with moral certainty. Everything Poe 
wrote, in his final and swiftly failing years, is discussed by most of his detractors 
without a suggestion that it comes from a shaken reason. The note of malice is 
normal. Professor Stringham takes as absolutely certain the story that Poe once 
said: "My whole nature utterly revolts at the idea that there is any Being in the 
universe superior to mvself." Now, that story (see it in Ingram's Life, Chap. 
XVIII.) has a most dubious aspect, coming as it does from a rather fanatical theist ; 
and I confess I have always doubted its truth. If it were true, it would to a candid 
critic surest incipient mania. On the other hand, it is essentially unjust so to 
discuss Pop's essav as to convev the idea that it ranks low among similar treatises. 
Professor Stringham calls it worthless, and a waste of time. If the same thing 
be said of the philosophies of Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel — • as it might just as well 
be — thp dismra^ement of Po^ would be somewhat discounted. But the can- 
dour of the current American criticism of Poe mav be gathered from a comparison 
of the language held towards his fallacies with that used in regard to the merely 
childish theism of Mr. Lowell and Mr. Lanier, and the random pantheism of Emer- 
son. On this head it may be added that Professor Stringham's criticism of Poe 
breaks down even on some scientific issues. He affirms of Poe's doctrine that the 
universe is in a state of ever-swifter collapse: "than this, nothing; could be more 
at variance with the great law of the conservation of energy." There is no such 
contradiction in the case; and if there were it would be equally chargeable against 
Mr. Spencer's theory of rhythmal disintegration and reintegration. Again, Pro- 
fessor Stringham charges Poe with showing " fundamental ignorance of astronomy" 
in saying that " the planets rotate (on their own axes) in elliptical orbits," without 
noting the need for a source of attraction at the foci of the ellipse. Yet Poe had 
expressly said in his Addenda to the Eureka (printed before Professor Stringham's 
critique in the new edition) that the sun's axis of rotation was " not the centre of 
his figure." and in the main treatise he had cited Lagrange's doctrine as to a varia- 
tion of the orbits of the spheroids from circle to ellipse, and back again, by reason 
of variation in their axes. I do not undertake to say that Poe's conception is 
sound; but I do say that Professor Stringham has misrepresented him. 



176 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

for it is a book in itself — has, indeed, some bad passages, where he 
essays to be humorous ; but as against this, it exhibits a competence 
in matters of abstract science, and a hold of scientific cosmic theory, 
that no English man of letters of that day possessed. Much sub- 
sequent scientific thinking is anticipated here; Mr. Spencer, in 
particular, might have drawn from it his fundamental principle of 
the correlation of progress and heterogeneity; and the poet is here 
found triumphantly and independently defending the Nebular 
Hypothesis at a time when former exponents of it had wavered and 
proposed to abandon it. 

To Dr. Browne's important commentary it might be added that 
in the preliminary section Poe emphatically forestalls some of the 
strongest recent declarations against the absolute Baconian theory 
of discovery, 1 that with two sweeps of his blade he demolishes a 
position which Mr. Balfour has only been able to take by laborious 
assault in his Defence 0} Philosophic Doubt; that he estimates 
Laplace with the confident discrimination of an expert; and that 
he speaks with intelligence on questions of astronomy which all 
but experts shun. Such is his measure of success, of impressive- 
ness, in an undertaking in which he finally fails. 

VII 

When, after thus discursively scanning the achievement of Poe, 
we return to the contemplation of him as a personality, there arises 
a feeling of absorbing wonderment at the strange paradox of his 
being; the extraordinary union of this regnant intellect with that 
ill-starred temperament; the weakness of the man foiling the 
strength of the mind. The facts are plain. While he was writing 
his most rigorous criticisms, and building up his cosmogony in the 
white light and dry air of the altitudes of his reasoning imagination, 
the man was not merely stumbling under the burden of his constitu- 
tional vice as if smitten by sorcery, but was living an emotional 
life of passionate yearnings and rending griefs. It was a lament- 
able life. After his stormy youth, in the latter part of which we 
find him attacked by the most crushing hypochondria, there came 
the cruel train of pangs represented by the illness of his wife, who 
seems to have truly "died a hundred deaths" before the release 

1 Compare Mill, System of Logic, B. VI. Chap. V. § 5; Jevons, Principles of 
Science, p. 576; Tyndall, Scientific Use of the Imagination and Other Essays, 3d 
ed. pp. 4, 8-9, 42-3 ; and Bagehot, Postulates of English Political Economy, Stu- 
dent's ed., pp. 17-19. 



POE 177 

came; and in this period it was, on his own account, that in a state 
of absolute frenzy between his woe and his bitter poverty, 1 which 
seemed to league itself with disease against the young victim, he 
first gave way to delirious alcoholism. His wife's death left him 
heart-shaken, the long agony of her decline having deepened his 
feeling for her into a passion of pitying worship. As years passed 
on, the unstrung emotionalism of the man made him turn first to 
one and then to another woman for sympathy and love — this 
while he maintained to the outside world, save in his lapses, his 
grave, lofty, high-bred calm of manner; and bated no jot of skill 
or thoroughness in his artistic work. While he makes distracted 
love to Mrs. Whitman, he never slackens in his keen derision of the 
transcendentalists, whose cloudy philosophy he could not abide. 
He writes his story of Hop Frog with his old impassable artistic 
aloofness, and writes about it to " Annie" in a letter touched with 
hysteria. " Forced, unnatural, false," " strained, exaggerated, 
and unnatural," are the terms Mr. Stoddard applies to these love- 
letters and letters of ecstatic friendship; and we cannot gainsay 
him here, save in so far as he imputes falsity. The case is one 
which Mr. Stoddard's primitive scalpel cannot dissect : what seems 
to him bad acting is neurosis. On the side of the affections Poe's 
sensitiveness becomes absolute disease; till the man who was 
accused of having no heart is wrecked by his heart's vibrations. 
But the intellect is never really subjected: it is shaken and de- 
throned at times by the breaking temperament; but it is uncon- 
quered to the last. He becomes almost insane when his engage- 
ment with Mrs. Whitman is broken; but he again collects himself, 
and he goes his way in silence. It is eminently significant that, as 
Mr. Ingram notes, he shows no resentment at being charged with 
aspiring to be a "glorious devil," all mind and no heart, 2 as he 

1 In an article in Harper's Magazine for May, 1887, entitled "The Recent 
Movement in Southern Literature," the writer, Mr. Charles W. Coleman, jun., 
says he has before him a series of letters written by Poe's employer on the Rich- 
mond Literary Messenger, in which it is complained that Poe "is continually after 
me for money. I am as sick of his writings as I am of him, and am rather more than 
half inclined to send him up another dozen dollars, and along with them all his 
unpublished MSS.," most of which are called "stuff." For his Pym story Poe 
asks three dollars a page. "In reality," says the employer, "it has cost me twenty 
dollars per page" — a statement which is not explained. At last comes this: 
"Highly as I really think of Mr. Poe's talents, I shall be forced to give him notice 
in a week or so at the furthest, that I can no longer recognize him as editor of the 
Messenger." One is not highly impressed by the tone of the writer; but Poe's 
neediness seems clear. 

2 Mr. Stedman in his latest criticism of Poe (Introd. to vol. vi. of new ed. of 
Works, p. 24) says of him, more in the manner of Griswold than in that of Mr. 

N 



178 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

was by some of the Brook Farm transcendentalists. The explana- 
tion, I think, clearly is that while he was conscious of his tendency 
to turn emotions into reasonings, he also knew his danger from his 
malady, and was eager to have it overlooked. "In the strange 
anomaly of my existence," says the narrator in Berenice — a story 
which offers abundant data for the "epilepsy" theory — "feelings 
with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were 
of the mind;" and here there is a certain touch of self-study; 
but we must not be misled by the phrase. Passionately quick, 
on the one hand, to resent moral aspersions, and extravagant in his 
emotional outbursts, he had the pride of intellect in a sufficient de- 
gree to wish, in his normal condition, to be regarded as above 
emotional weakness. One who knew him in his latter days thought 
there was to be detected in him a constant effort for self-control. 

Looking back on his hapless career, and contrasting his deserts 
with his lot, and with his reputation, one realizes with new cer- 
tainty the worthlessness of most contemporary judgments. There 
are stories of his scrupulous conscientiousness and of his social 
considerateness such as could be told of few of his detractors; 
and yet we find one of his women friends resorting to inaccurate 
phrenology to account for the defects she inferred in his moral 
nature. Absolutely innocent in his relations with women, though 
his unworldly romanticism in their regard carried him into some 

Stedman's earlier essay: "A speck of reservation spoiled for him the fullest cup 
of esteem, even when tendered by the most knightly and authoritative hands. 
Lowell's A Fable for Critics, declaring 'three-fifths of him genius,' gave him an 
award which ought to content even an unreasonable man. As it was, the good- 
natured thrusts of one whose scholarship was unassailable, at his metrical and other 
hobbies, drew from him a somewhat coarse and vindictive review of the whole 
satire." It is true that Poe's review is bad in tone; but that does not put Mr. Sted- 
man in the right, or bear out his zealous panegyric of Mr. Lowell. He oddly omits 
to cite the "two-fifths sheer fudge," though he seems to think that Poe ought to have 
welcomed Mr. Lowell's kicks for the sake of his sixpences. As against this addi- 
tion to the countless one-sided verdicts on Poe, I must point out, (1) that Poe in his 
critique exhibits anger only over Mr. Lowell's very coarse attack on Southern 
slaveholders in general; (2) that though Mr. Lowell's lines on Poe were suffi- 
ciently impertinent he makes no protest on that head; (3) that Mr. Lowell's versi- 
fication, on which Poe spends most of his blame, was really excessively bad, 
whatever his "scholarship" may have been, and cried aloud for a retort from the 
assailed metricist; and (4) that Poe's show of vindictiveness is as nothing com- 
pared with the passionate resentment exhibited in one of Mr. Lowell's letters, 
recently published (Vol. I. p. 109), on the score of Poe's having charged him with a 
plagiarism. An obvious blunder in Poe's citation of the passage imitated, he 
actually declares to have been a wilful perversion, though the easy exposure of it 
would at once tend to discredit Poe's charge. For the rest, Mr. Lowell's critical 
treatment of Thoreau makes it difficult for some of us to see in him the "knightly 
and authoritative " critical paragon of Mr. Stedman's worship. 



POE 179 

miserable embroilments, he came to be reputed an extreme liber- 
tine; and his one fatal failing lost him some of the friendships he 
most needed;, virtue and goodness being not always as merciful 
as might be — not to say a trifle stupid. One of the most intensely 
concentrative and painstaking of writers, he has been stigmatized 
as indolent and spendthrift. To quote once more from the judg- 
ment of Professor Minto in the Encyclo pcedia Britannica, a vin- 
dication which, it is to be hoped, will set the current 1 of a true ap- 
preciation of the man : — " Poe failed to make a living by literature, 
not because he was an irregular profligate in the vulgar sense, but 
because he did ten times as much work as he was paid to do — a 
species of profligacy perhaps, but not quite the same in kind as that 
with which he was charged by his biographer." Pity and praise, 
we repeat finally, are far more his due than blame. Morally he 
lives for us as the high-strung, birth-stricken, suffering man, 
"whom unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster," 
till, instead of the proud, noble countenance of the earlier days, we 
see in his latest portrait, as M. Hennequin describes it in his vivid 
French way, a "face as of an old woman, white and haggard, hol- 
lowed, relaxed, ploughed with all the lines of grief and of the shaken 
reason ; where over the sunken eyes, dimmed and dolorous and far- 
gazing, there is throned the one feature unblemished still, the 
superb forehead, high and firm, behind which his soul is expiring." 
The pity of it all, and of the inexpressibly tragic conclusion, is too 
profound to be outweighed by the remembrance that the "delicate 
and splendid cerebral mechanism" remained, for its ratiocinative 
purposes, almost intact to the end. But it is by that magnificent 
endowment that the world is bound to remember him. Among the 
crowd of men of one or of a few capacities, winning distinction by 
giving their whole strength to this pursuit or that, and living with 
hardly any other intellectual interest, he stands forth as an intelli- 
gence of singularly various equipment and faculty. Science was 
not too dry for him ; the analysis of style not too subtle or frivolous : 
he could frame exquisite verse and stringent logic with equal mas- 
tery and equal zeal. As a boy he had a turn for swimming such 
as would have led many men into a career of sheer athletics ; in a 
paper on The Philosophy of Furniture he embodies a passion for 

1 In the dearth of adequate estimates of Poe, it is much to be able to add to Mr. 
Minto's that of Lord Tennyson, published after this essay was first written. Ac- 
cording to the newspaper report, the Laureate in conversation or correspondence 
ranked Poe highest among American men of letters, describing some more popular 
writers as "pygmies" beside him. 



180 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

minor aesthetics such as can serve some men for a life's mission. 
For him there were no parochial boundaries in the world of the in- 
tellect : he was free of all provinces ; overproud of his range, per- 
haps, but with an unusual title to be proud. And thus it is that we 
are fain to think of him as more than a poet, more than a critic, 
more than an aesthete, more than a tale-teller, more than a scientific 
thinker ; a strange combination not seen in every age, and lastingly 
remarkable as such. He was a great brain. 



VIII 

JOHN DRYDEN 
(1631-1700) 

PREFACE TO THE FABLES 
(1700) 

'Tis with a poet, as with a man who designs to build, and is 
very exact, as he supposes, in casting up the cost beforehand; 
but, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his account, and reckons 
short in the expense he first intended. He alters his mind as the 
work proceeds, and will have this or that convenience more, of 
which he had not thought when he began. So has it happened 
to me. I have built a house, where I intended but a lodge; yet 
with better success than a certain nobleman, who, beginning 
with a dog-kennel, never lived to finish the palace he had con- 
trived. 

From translating the first of Homer's Iliads (which I intended 
as an essay to the whole work) I proceeded to the translation of 
the twelfth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, because it contains, 
among other things, the causes, the beginning, and ending, of 
the Trojan war. Here I ought in reason to have stopped; but 
the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses lying next in my way, I could 
not balk them. When I had compassed them, I was so taken 
with the former part of the fifteenth book (which is the master- 
piece of the whole Metamorphoses), that I enjoined myself the 
pleasing task of rendering it into English. And now I found, 
by the number of my verses, that they began to swell into a little 
volume; which gave me an occasion of looking backward on 
some beauties of my author, in his former books : there occurred 
to me the Hunting of the Boar, Cinyras and Myrrha, the good- 
natured story of Baucis and Philemon, with the rest, which I hope 

181 



1 82 JOHN DRY DEN 

I have translated closely enough, and given them the same turn 
of verse which they had in the original; and this, I may say with- 
out vanity, is not the talent of every poet. He who has arrived 
the nearest to it, is the ingenious and learned Sandys, the best 
versifier of the former age ; if I may properly call it by that name, 
which was the former part of this concluding century. For 
Spenser and Fairfax both flourished in the reign of Queen Eliza- 
beth; great masters in our language, and who saw much farther 
into the beauties of our numbers than those who immediately 
followed them. Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and 
Mr. Waller of Fairfax, for we have our lineal descents and clans 
as well as other families. Spenser more than once insinuates 
that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body, and that 
he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease. 
Milton has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his original; 
and many besides myself have heard our famous Waller own that 
he derived the harmony of his numbers from the Godfrey of Bul- 
loign, which was turned into English by Mr. Fairfax. 

But to return. Having done with Ovid for this time, it came 
into my mind that our old English poet, Chaucer, in many things 
resembled him, and that with no disadvantage on the side of the 
modern author, as I shall endeavour to prove when I compare 
them; and as I am, and always have been, studious to promote 
the honour of my native country, so I soon resolved to put their 
merits to the trial, by turning some of the Canterbury Tales into 
our language, as it is now refined; for by this means, both the 
poets being set in the same light, and dressed in the same English 
habit, story to be compared with story, a certain judgment may 
be made betwixt them by the reader, without obtruding my opin- 
ion on him. Or if I seem partial to my countryman and predeces- 
sor in the laurel, the friends of antiquity are not few; and besides 
many of the learned, Ovid has almost all the beaux, and the whole 
fair sex, his declared patrons. Perhaps I have assumed some- 
what more to myself than they allow me, because I have adven- 
tured to sum up the evidence; but the readers are the jury, and 
their privilege remains entire, to decide according to the merits 
of the cause, or, if they please, to bring it to another hearing before 
some other court. In the meantime, to follow the thread of my 
discourse (as thoughts, according to Mr. Hobbes, have always 
some connection) , so from Chaucer I was led to think on Boccace, 
who was not only his contemporary, but also pursued the same 



PREFACE TO THE FABLES 183 

studies; wrote novels in prose, and many works in verse; par- 
ticularly is said to have invented the octave rhyme, or stanza of 
eight lines, which ever since has been maintained by the practice 
of all Italian writers, who are, or at least assume the title of heroic 
poets. He and Chaucer, among other things, had this in common, 
that they refined their mother tongue; but with this difference, 
that Dante had begun to file their language, at least in verse, before 
the time of Boccace, who likewise received no little help from his 
master Petrarch. But the reformation of their prose was wholly 
owing to Boccace himself, who is yet the standard of purity in 
the Italian tongue, though many of his phrases are become obso- 
lete, as in process of time it must needs happen. Chaucer (as 
you have formerly been told by our learned Mr. Rymer) first 
adorned and amplified our barren tongue from the Provencal, 
which was then the most polished of all the modern languages; 
but this subject has been copiously treated by that great critic, 
who deserves no little commendation from us his countrymen. 
For these reasons of time, and resemblance of genius, in Chaucer 
and Boccace, I resolved to join them in my present work, to which 
I have added some original papers of my own, which, whether 
they are equal or inferior to my other poems, an author is the most 
improper judge; and therefore I leave them wholly to the mercy 
of the reader. I will hope the best, that they will not be con- 
demned; but if they should, I have the excuse of an old gentle- 
man, who, mounting on horseback before some ladies, when I 
was present, got up somewhat heavily, but desired of the fair 
spectators that they would count four-score-and-eight before they 
judged him. By the mercy of God, I am already come within 
twenty years of his number, a cripple in my limbs ; but what decays 
are in my mind, the reader must determine. I think myself as 
vigorous as ever in the faculties of my soul, excepting only my 
memory, which is not impaired to any great degree ; and if; I lose 
not more of it, I have no great reason to complain. What judg- 
ment I had, increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, 
such as they are, come crowding in SO fast upon me, that my only 
difficulty is to choose or to reject; to run them into verse, or to 
give them the other harmony of prose. I have so long studied 
and practised both, that they are grown into a habit, and become 
familiar to me. In short, though I may lawfully plead some part 
of the old gentleman's excuse, yet I will reserve it till I think I 
have greater need, and ask no grains of allowance for the faults 



I 

184 JOHN DRYDEN 

of this my present work, but those which are given of course to 
human frailty. I will not trouble my reader with the shortness 
of time in which I writ it, or the several intervals of sickness. 
They who think too well of their own performances, are apt to 
boast in their prefaces how little time their works have cost them, 
and what other business of more importance interfered; but the 
reader will be as apt to ask the question, why they allowed not a 
longer time to make their works more perfect? and why they 
had so despicable an opinion of their judges, as to thrust their 
indigested stuff upon them, as if they deserved no better ? 

With this account of my present undertaking, I conclude the 
first part of this discourse: in the second part, as at a second 
sitting, though I alter not the draught, I must touch the same 
features over again, and change the dead colouring of the whole. 
In general, I will only say, that I have written nothing which 
savours of immorality or profaneness; at least, I am not con- 
scious to myself of any such intention. If there happen to be 
found an irreverent expression, or a thought too wanton, they are 
crept into my verses through my inadvertency; if the searchers 
find any in the cargo, let them be staved or forfeited, like con- 
trabanded goods; at least, let their authors be answerable for 
them, as being but imported merchandise, and not of my own 
manufacture. On the other side, I have endeavoured to choose 
such fables, both ancient and modern, as contain in each of them 
some instructive moral, which I could prove by induction, but 
the way is tedious; and they leap foremost into sight, without 
the reader's trouble of looking after them. I wish I could affirm, 
with a safe conscience, that I had taken the same care in all my 
former writings; for it must be owned, that supposing verses 
are never so beautiful or pleasing, yet if they contain anything 
which shocks religion, or good manners, they are at best what 
Horace says of good numbers without good sense, Versus inopes 
-rerum, nugceque canorcz. 1 Thus far, I hope, I am right in court, 
without renouncing my other right of self-defence, where I have 
been wrongfully accused, and my sense wire-drawn into blas- 
phemy or bawdry, as it has often been by a religious lawyer, in 
a late pleading against the stage; in which he mixes truth with 
falsehood, and has not forgotten the old rule of calumniating 
strongly, that something may remain. 

1 [Verses barren of ideas, and songs of no account.] 



PREFACE TO THE FABLES 185 

I resume the thrid of my discourse with the first of my transla- 
tions, which was the first Iliad of Homer. If it shall please God 
to give me longer life, and moderate health, my intentions are to 
translate the whole Ilias ; provided still that I meet with those 
encouragements from the public, which may enable me to proceed 
in my undertaking with some cheerfulness. And this I dare 
assure the world beforehand, that I have found, by trial, Homer 
a more pleasing task than Virgil, though I say not the translation 
will be less laborious; for the Grecian is more according to my 
genius than the Latin poet. In the works of the two authors 
we may read their manners and inclinations, which are wholly 
different. Virgil was of a quiet, sedate temper; Homer was 
violent, impetuous, and full of fire. The chief talent of Virgil 
was propriety of thoughts, and ornament of words; Homer was 
rapid in his thoughts, and took all the liberties, both of numbers 
and of expressions, which his language, and the age in which he 
lived, allowed him. Homer's invention was more copious, Virgil's 
more confined; so that if Homer had not led the way, it was not 
in Virgil to have begun heroic poetry; for nothing can be more 
evident, than that the Roman poem is but the second part of the 
Ilias; a continuation of the same story, and the persons already 
formed. The manners of yEneas are those of Hector superadded 
to those which Homer gave him. The adventures of Ulysses 
in the Odysseis are imitated in the first six books of Virgil's JEneis; 
and though the accidents are not the same (which would have 
argued him of a servile copying, and total barrenness of invention), 
yet the seas were the same in which both the heroes wandered; 
and Dido cannot be denied to be the poetical daughter of Calypso. 
The six latter books of Virgil's poem are the four and twenty 
Iliads contracted ; a quarrel occasioned by a lady, a single combat, 
battles fought, and a town besieged. I say not this in derogation 
to Virgil, neither do I contradict anything which I have formerly 
said in his just praise : for his episodes are almost wholly of his own 
invention ; and the form which he has given to the telling, makes 
the tale his own, even though the original story had been the 
same. But this proves, however, that Homer taught Virgil to 
design; and if invention be the first virtue of an epic poet, then 
the Latin poem can only be allowed the second place. Mr. 
Hobbes, in the preface to his own bald translation of the Ilias 
(studying poetry as he did mathematics, when it was too late), 
Mr. Hobbes, I say, begins the praise of Homer where he should 



1 86- JOHN DRYDEN 1 

have ended it. He tells us that the first beauty of an epic poem 
consists in diction, that is, in the choice of words, and harmony 
of numbers. Now the words are the colouring of the work, which 
in the order of nature is the last to be considered. The design, 
the disposition, the manners, and the thoughts are all before it: 
where any of those are wanting or imperfect, so much wants or 
is imperfect in the imitation of human life; which is in the very 
definition of a poem. Words, indeed, like glaring colours, are 
the first beauties that arise and strike the sight : but if the draught 
be false or lame, the figures ill-disposed, the manners obscure 
or inconsistent, or the thoughts unnatural, then the finest colours 
are but daubing, and the piece is a beautiful monster at the best. 
Neither Virgil nor Homer were deficient in any of the former 
beauties; but in this last, which is expression, the Roman poet 
is at least equal to the Grecian, as I have said elsewhere; supply- 
ing the poverty of his language by his musical ear, and by his 
diligence. 

But to return: our two great poets, being so different in their 
tempers, one choleric and sanguine, the other phlegmatic and 
melancholic; that which makes them excel in their several ways 
is, that each of them has followed his own natural inclination, 
as well in forming the design, as in the execution of it. The 
very heroes show their authors: Achilles is hot, impatient, re- 
vengeful, etc., Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer, etc. 1 ^Eneas 
patient, considerate, careful of his people, and merciful to his 
enemies; ever submissive to the will of heaven — ■ quo fata trahunt, 
retrahuntque, sequamur. 2 I could please myself with enlarging 
on this subject, but am forced to defer it to a fitter time. From 
all I have said I will only draw this inference, that the action 
of Homer being more full of vigour than that of Virgil, according 
to the temper of the writer, is of consequence more pleasing to 
the reader. One warms you by degrees ; the other sets you on 
fire all at once, and never intermits its heat. 'Tis the same 
difference which Longinus makes betwixt the effects of eloquence 
in Demosthenes and Tully ; one persuades, the other commands. 
You never cool while you read Homer, even not in the second 
book (a graceful flattery to his countrymen) ; but he hastens 
from the ships, and concludes not that book till he has made you 

1 [Energetic, choleric, inexorable, violent.] 

2 [Wherever the fates lead us back and forth, let us follow.] 



PREFACE TO THE FABLES 187 

an amends by the violent playing of a new machine. From 
thence he hurries on his action with variety of events, and ends 
it in less compass than two months. This vehemence of his, 
I confess, is more suitable to my temper; and therefore I have 
translated his first book with greater pleasure than any part of 
Virgil; but it was not a pleasure without pains. The continual 
agitations of the spirits must needs be a weakening of any consti- 
tution, especially in age; and many pauses are required for re- 
freshment betwixt the heats ; the Iliad of itself being a third part 
longer than all Virgil's works together. 

This is what I thought needful in this place to say of Homer. 
I proceed to Ovid and Chaucer, considering the former only in 
relation to the latter. With Ovid ended the golden age of the 
Roman tongue; from Chaucer the purity of the English tongue 
began. The manners of the poets were not unlike : both of them 
were well-bred, well-natured, amorous, and libertine, at least in 
their writings, it may be also in their lives. Their studies were 
the same, philosophy and philology. Both of them were known 
in astronomy, of which Ovid's books of the Roman Feasts, and 
Chaucer's Treatise of the Astrolabe, are sufficient witnesses. But 
Chaucer was likewise an astrologer, as were Virgil, Horace, 
Persius, and Manilius. Both writ with wonderful facility and 
clearness; neither were great inventors; for Ovid only copied 
the Grecian fables, and most of Chaucer's stories were taken 
from his Italian contemporaries, or their predecessors. Boccace 
his Decameron was first published, and from thence our English- 
man has borrowed many of his Canterbury Tales; yet that of 
Palamon and Arcite was written in all probability by some Italian 
wit in a former age, as I shall prove hereafter. The tale of Grizild 
was the invention of Petrarch; by him sent to Boccace, from 
whom it came to Chaucer. Troilus and Cressida was also written 
by a Lombard author, but much amplified by our English trans- 
lator, as well as beautified; the genius of our countrymen in 
general being rather to improve an invention than to invent them- 
selves, as is evident not only in our poetry, but in many of our 
manufactures. I find I have anticipated already, and taken up 
from Boccace before I come to him; but there is so much less 
behind ; and I am of the temper of most kings, who love to be in 
debt, are all for present money, no matter how they pay it after- 
wards ; besides, the nature of a preface is rambling, never wholly 
out of the way, nor in it, This I have learned from the practice 



1 88 JOHN DRYDEN 

of honest Montaigne, and return at my pleasure to Ovid and 
Chaucer, of whom I have little more to say. 

Both of them built on the inventions of other men; yet since 
Chaucer had something of his own, as the Wife of Bath's Tale, 
The Cock and the Fox, which I have translated, and some others, 
I may justly give our countryman the precedence in that part, since 
I can remember nothing of Ovid which was wholly his. Both 
of them understood the manners; under which name I compre- 
hend the passions, and, in a larger sense, the descriptions of 
persons, and their very habits. For an example, I see Baucis 
and Philemon as perfectly before me, as if some ancient painter 
had drawn them; and all the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, 
their humours, their features, and the very dress, as distinctly 
as if I had supped with them at the Tabard in Southwark. Yet 
even there too the figures in Chaucer are much more lively, and 
set in a better light; which though I have not time to prove, yet 
I appeal to the reader, and am sure he will clear me from partiality. 
The thoughts and words remain to be considered in the compari- 
son of the two poets; and I have saved myself one half of that 
labour, by owning that Ovid lived when the Roman tongue was 
in its meridian, Chaucer in the dawning of our language; there- 
fore that part of the comparison stands not on an equal foot, 
any more than the diction of Ennius and Ovid, or of Chaucer 
and our present English. The words are given up as a post not 
to be defended in our poet, because he wanted the modern art 
of fortifying. The thoughts remain to be considered; and they 
are to be measured only by their propriety, that is, as they flow 
more or less naturally from the persons described, on such and 
such occasions. The vulgar judges, which are nine parts in ten 
of all nations, who call conceits and jingles wit, who see Ovid full 
of them, and Chaucer altogether without them, will think me 
little less than mad, for preferring the Englishman to the Roman ; 
yet, with their leave, I must presume to say, that the things they 
admire are only glittering trifles, and so far from being witty, 
that in a serious poem they are nauseous, because they are un- 
natural. Would any man, who is ready to die for love, describe 
his passion like Narcissus? Would he think of inopem me copia 
fecit, 1 and a dozen more of such expressions, poured on the neck 
of one another, and signifying all the same thing? If this were 
wit, was this a time to be witty, when the poor wretch was in the 

1 [Abundance has made me poor.] 



PREFACE TO THE FABLES 189 

agony of death? This is just John Littlewit in Bartholomew 
Fair, who had a conceit (as he tells you) left him in his misery; 
a miserable conceit. On these occasions the poet should endeav- 
our to raise pity; but instead of this, Ovid is tickling you to laugh. 
Virgil never made use of such machines, when he was moving 
you to commiserate the death of Dido: he would not destroy 
what he was building. Chaucer makes Arcite violent in his love, 
and unjust in the pursuit of it ; yet when he came to die, he made 
him think more reasonably : he repents not of his love, for that 
had altered his character, but acknowledges the injustice of his 
proceedings, and resigns Emilia to Palamon. What would Ovid 
have done on this occasion? He would certainly have made 
Arcite witty on his death-bed. He had complained he was farther 
off from possession by being so near, and a thousand such boyisms, 
which Chaucer rejected as below the dignity of the subject. They, 
who think otherwise, would by* the same reason prefer Lucan 
and Ovid to Homer and Virgil, and Martial to all four of them. 
As for the turn of words, in which Ovid particularly excels all 
poets, they are sometimes a fault, and sometimes a beauty, as they 
are used properly or improperly; but in strong passions always 
to be shunned, because passions are serious, and will admit no 
playing. The French have a high value for them ; and, I confess, 
they are often what they call delicate, when they are introduced 
with judgment; but Chaucer writ with more simplicity, and 
followed nature more closely, than to use them. I have thus 
far, to the best of my knowledge, been an upright judge betwixt 
the parties in competition, not meddling with the design nor the 
disposition of it, because the design was not their own, and in the 
disposing of it they were equal. It remains that I say somewhat 
of Chaucer in particular. 

In the first place, as he is the father of English poetry, so I hold 
him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians held Homer 
or the Romans Virgil: he is a perpetual fountain of good sense, 
learned in all sciences, and therefore speaks properly on all sub- 
jects; as he knew what to say, so he knows also when to leave 
off, a continence which is practised by few writers, and scarcely 
by any of the ancients, excepting Virgil and Horace. One of our 
late great poets is sunk in his reputation, because he could never 
forgive any conceit which came in his way, but swept like a drag- 
net great and small. There was plenty enough, but the dishes 
were ill-sorted; whole pyramids of sweetmeats for boys and 



1 90 JOHN DRY DEN 

women, but little of solid meat for men: all this proceeded not 
from any want of knowledge, but of judgment; neither did he 
want that in discerning the beauties and faults of other poets, 
but only indulged himself in the luxury of writing, and per- 
haps knew it was a fault, but hoped the reader would not find 
it. For this reason, though he must always be thought a 
great poet, he is no longer esteemed a good writer; and 
for ten impressions, which his works have had in so many 
successive years, yet at present a hundred books are scarcely 
purchased once a twelve-month; for as my last Lord Roch- 
ester said, though somewhat profanely, "Not being of God, 
he could not stand." 

Chaucer followed nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go 
beyond her; and there is a great difference of being poeta and 
nimis poeta, 1 if we believe Catullus, as much as betwixt a modest 
behaviour and affectation. Theverse of Chaucer, I confess, is not 
harmonious to us, but 'tis like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus 
commends, it was auribus istius temporis accommodata : 2 they 
who lived with him, and some time after him, thought it musical ; 
and it continues so even in our judgment, if compared with the 
numbers of Lydgate and Gower, his contemporaries; there is the 
rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, 
though not perfect. 'Tis true I cannot go so far as he who pub- 
lished the last edition of him; for he would make us believe the 
fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten syllables in a verse 
where we find but nine, but this opinion is not worth confuting, 
it is so gross and obvious an error that common sense (which is a 
rule in everything but matters of faith and revelation) must con- 
vince the reader that equality of numbers in every verse, which we 
call heroic, was either not known, or not always practised, in Chau- 
cer's age. It were an easy matter to produce some thousands of 
his verses, which are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes 
a whole one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise. 
We can only say that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that 
nothing is brought to perfection at the first. We must be children 
before we grow men. There was an Ennius, and in process of 
time a Lucilius and a Lucretius, before Virgil and Horace; even 
after Chaucer there was a Spenser, a Harrington, a Fairfax, before 
Waller and Denham were in being; and our numbers were in 

1 [Too much of a poet.] 2 [Tempered to the ear of the very times.] 



PREFACE TO THE FABLES 191 

their nonage till these last appeared. I need say little of his 
parentage, life, and fortunes : they are to be found at large in all 
the editions of his works. He was employed abroad, and favoured 
by Edward the Third, Richard the Second, and Henry the Fourth, 
and was poet, as I suppose, to all three of them. In Richard's 
time, I doubt, he was a little dipt in the rebellion of the Commons, 
and being brother-in-law to John of Gaunt, it was no wonder if he 
followed the fortunes of that family, and was well with Henry the 
Fourth when he had deposed his predecessor. Neither is it to be 
admired that Henry, who was a wise as well as a valiant prince, 
who claimed by succession, and was sensible that his title was not 
sound, but was rightfully in Mortimer, who had married the heir 
of York; it was not to be admired, I say, if that great politician 
should be pleased to have the greatest wit of those times in his 
interests, and to be the trumpet of his praises. Augustus had given 
him the example, by the advice of Maecenas, who recommended 
Virgil and Horace to him, whose praises helped to make him popu- 
lar while he was alive, and after his death have made him precious 
to posterity. As for the religion of our poet, he seems to have some 
little bias towards the opinions of Wickliff, after John of Gaunt his 
patron ; somewhat of which appears in the tale of Piers Plowman : 
yet I cannot blame him for inveighing so sharply against the vices 
of the clergy in his age; their pride, their ambition, their pomp, 
their avarice, their worldly interest deserved the lashes which he 
gave them, both in that and in most of his Canterbury Tales: 
neither has his contemporary Boccace spared them. Yet both 
these poets lived in much esteem with good and holy men in orders ; 
for the scandal which is given by particular priests, reflects not 
on the sacred function. Chaucer's Monk, his Canon, and his Friar 
took not from the character of his Good Parson. A satirical poet 
is the check of the laymen on bad priests. We are only to take care 
that we involve not the innocent with the guilty in the same con- 
demnation. The good cannot be too much honoured, nor the bad 
too coarsely used ; for the corruption of the best becomes the worst. 
When a clergyman is whipped his gown is first taken off, by which 
the dignity of his order is secured; if he be wrongfully accused, he 
has his action of slander ; and it is at the poet's peril if he transgress 
the law. But they will tell us that all kind of satire, though never 
so well-deserved by particular priests, yet brings the whole order 
into contempt. Is, then, the peerage of England anything dis- 
honoured when a peer suffers for his treason? If he be libelled, 



192 



JOHN DRY DEN 



or any way defamed, he has his Scandalum Magnatum 1 to punish 
the offender. They who use this kind of argument seem to be 
conscious to themselves of somewhat which has deserved the poet's 
lash, and are less concerned for their public capacity than for their 
private; at least there is pride at the bottom of their reasoning. 
If the faults of men in orders are only to be judged among them- 
selves, they are all in some sort parties; for, since they say the 
honour of their order is concerned in every member of it, how can 
we be sure that they will be impartial judges ? How far I may be 
allowed to speak my opinion in this case I know not, but I am sure 
a dispute of this nature caused mischief in abundance betwixt 
a King of England and an Archbishop of Canterbury; one stand- 
ing up for the laws of his land, and the other for the honour (as he 
called it) of God's Church; which ended in the murder of the 
prelate, and in the whipping of his majesty from post to pillar for 
his penance. The learned and ingenious Dr. Drake has saved 
me the labour of inquiring into the esteem and reverence which the 
priests have had of old ; and I would rather extend than diminish 
any part of it : yet I must needs say, that when a priest provokes 
me without any occasion given him, I have no reason, unless it be 
the charity of a Christian, to forgive him. Prior laesit 2 is justifica- 
tion sufficient in the civil law. If I answer him in his own language, 
self-defence, I am sure, must be allowed me; and if I carry it 
farther, even to a sharp recrimination, somewhat may be indulged 
to human frailty. Yet my resentment has not wrought so far, but 
that I have followed Chaucer, in his character of a holy man, and 
have enlarged on that subject with some pleasure, reserving to 
myself the right, if I shall think fit hereafter, to describe another sort 
of priests, such as are more easily to be found than the Good Par- 
son; such as have given the last blow to Christianity in this age, 
by a practice so contrary to their doctrine. But this will keep cold 
till another time. In the meanwhile, I take up Chaucer where I 
left him. 

He must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive 
nature, because, as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken 
into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the various manners and 
humours (as we now call them) of the whole English nation, in his 
age. Not a single character has escaped him. All his pilgrims 

1 ["In law, the offense of speaking slanderously or in defamation of high 
personages (magnates) of the realm, as temporal and spiritual peers, judges, and 
other high officers." — Century Dictionary.] 

2 [He did the first injury.] 



PREFACE TO THE FABLES 1 93 

are severally distinguished from each other ; and not only in their 
inclinations, but in their very physiognomies and persons. Bap- 
tista Porta could not have described their natures better than by 
the marks which the poet gives them. The matter and manner of 
their tales, and of their telling, are so suited to their different edu- 
cations, humours, and callings that each of them would be improper 
in any other mouth. Even the grave and serious characters are 
distinguished by their several sorts of gravity : their discourses are 
such as belong to their age, their calling, and their breeding; such 
as are becoming of them, and of them only. Some of his persons 
are vicious, and some virtuous ; some are unlearned, or (as Chau- 
cer calls them) lewd, and some are learned. Even the ribaldry 
of the low characters is different : the Reeve, the Miller, and the 
Cook are several men, and distinguished from each other, as much 
as the mincing Lady- Prioress, and the broad-speaking gap-toothed 
Wife of Bath. But enough of this : there is such a variety of game 
springing up before me, that I am distracted in my choice, and 
know not which to follow. 'Tis sufficient to say, according to the 
proverb, that here is God's plenty. We have our forefathers and 
great-grand-dames all before us, as they were in Chaucer's days; 
their general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even 
in England, though they are called by other names than those of 
Monks, and Friars, and Canons, and Lady Abbesses, and Nuns; 
for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though 
everything is altered. May I have leave to do myself the justice 
(since my enemies will do me none, and are so far from granting 
me to be a good poet that they will not allow me so much as to be 
a Christian, or a moral man), may I have leave, I say, to inform 
my reader that I have confined my choice to such tales of Chaucer 
as savour nothing of immodesty ? If I had desired more to please 
than to instruct, the Reeve, the Miller, the Shipman, the Merchant, 
the Summoner, and, above all, the Wife of Bath, in the prologue 
to her tale, would have procured me as many friends and readers 
as there are beaux and ladies of pleasure in the town. But I will 
no more offend against good manners : I am sensible, as I ought to 
be, of the scandal I have given by my loose writings, and make 
what reparation I am able by this public acknowledgment. If 
anything of this nature, or of profaneness, be crept into these 
poems, I am so far from defending it that I disown it. Totum 
hoc indicium volo. 1 Chaucer makes another manner of apology 
1 [All this I wish unsaid.] 
o 



1 94 JOHN DRY DEN 

for his broad speaking, and Boccace makes the like; but I will 
follow neither or them. Our countryman, in the end of his Char- 
acters, before the Canterbury Tales, thus excuses the ribaldry, 
which is very gross in many of his novels. 

But firste, I pray you of your courtesy, 
That ye ne arrete it not my villany, 
Though that I plainly speak in this mattere 
To tellen you her words, and eke her chere : 
Ne though I speak her words properly, 
For this ye knowen as well as I, 
Who shall tellen a tale after a man, 
He mote rehearse as nye as ever he can 
Everich word of it be in his charge, 
All speke he, never so rudely, ne large. 

Or else he mote tellen his tale untrue, 

Or feine things, or find words new : 

He may not spare, altho he were his brother, 

He mote as well say o word as another. 

Christ spake himself f ul broad in holy writ, 

And well I wot no villany is it. 

Eke Plato saith, who so can him rede, 

The words mote been cousin to the dede. 

Yet if a man should have inquired of Boccace or of Chaucer, 
what need they had of introducing such characters where obscene 
words were proper in their mouths, but very indecent to be heard; 
I know not what answer they could have made; for that reason, 
such tales shall be left untold by me. You have here a specimen 
of Chaucer's language, which is so obsolete, that his sense is scarce 
to be understood; and you have likewise more than one example 
of his unequal numbers, which were mentioned before. Yet many 
of his verses consist of ten syllables, and the words not much be- 
hind our present English : as, for example, these two lines, in the 
description of the Carpenter's young wife : — 

Wincing she was, as is a jolly colt, 
Long as a mast, and upright as a bolt. 

I have almost done with Chaucer, when I have answered some 
objections relating to my present work. I find some people are 
offended that I have turned these tales into modern English; be- 
cause they think them unworthy of my pains, and look on Chaucer 
as a dry, old-fashioned wit, not worth reviving. I have often heard 
the late Earl of Leicester say, that Mr. Cowley himself was of that 



PREFACE TO THE FABLES 195 

opinion; who, having read him over at my lord's request, declared 
he had no taste of him. I dare not advance my opinion against the 
judgment of so great an author : but I think it fair, however, to 
leave the decision to the public. Mr. Cowley was too modest to 
set up for a dictator ; and being shocked perhaps with his old style, 
never examined into the depth of his good sense. Chaucer, I con- 
fess, is a rough diamond, and must first be polished, ere he shines. 
I deny not, likewise, that, living in our early times he writes not 
always of a piece, but sometimes mingles trivial things with those 
of greater moment. Sometimes also, though not often, he runs 
riot, like Ovid, and knows not when he has said enough. But there 
are more great wits besides Chaucer, whose fault is their excess of 
conceits, and those ill sorted. An author is not to write all he can, 
but only all he ought. Having observed this redundancy in Chau- 
cer (as it is an easy matter for a man of ordinary parts to find a 
fault in one of greater), I have not tied myself to a literal translation ; 
but have often omitted what I judged unnecessary, or not of dig- 
nity enough to appear in the company of better thoughts. I have 
presumed farther, in some places, and added somewhat of my own 
where I thought my author was deficient, and had not given his 
thoughts their true lustre, for want of words in the beginning of our 
language. And to this I was the more emboldened, because (if I 
may be permitted to say it of myself) I found I had a soul congenial 
to his, and that I had been conversant in the same studies. An- 
other poet, in another age, may take the same liberty with my writ- 
ings ; if at least they live long enough to deserve correction. It was 
also necessary sometimes to restore the sense of Chaucer, which was 
lost or mangled in the errors of the press : let this example suffice 
at present; in the story of Palamon and Arcite, where the temple 
of Diana is described, you find these verses, in all the editions of our 
author : — 

There saw I Dane turned into a tree, 

I mean not the goddess Diane, 

But Venus daughter, which that hight Dane: 

Which, after a little consideration, I knew was to be reformed into 
this sense, that Daphne, the daughter of Peneus, was turned into 
a tree. I durst not make thus bold with Ovid, lest some future 
Milbourn should arise, and say, I varied from my author, because 
I understood him not. 

But there are other judges who think I ought not to have trans- 
lated Chaucer into English, out of a quite contrary notion: they 



196 JOHN DRY DEN 

suppose there is a certain veneration due to his old language; 
and that it is a little less than profanation and sacrilege to alter it. 
They are farther of opinion, that somewhat of his good sense will 
suffer in this transfusion, and much of the beauty of his thoughts 
will infallibly be lost, which appear with more grace in their old 
habit. Of this opinion was that excellent person, whom I men- 
tioned, the late Earl of Leicester, who valued Chaucer as much as 
Mr. Cowley despised him. My lord dissuaded me from this at- 
tempt (for I was thinking of it some years before his death), and 
his authority prevailed so far with me, as to defer my undertaking 
while he lived, in deference to him : yet my reason was not con- 
vinced with what he urged against it. If the first end of a writer 
be to be understood, then as his language grows obsolete, his 
thoughts must grow obscure: — 

Multa renascentur quae nunc cecidere; cadentque, 
Quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula si volet usus 
Quern penes arbitrium est et jus et norma loquendi. 1 

When an ancient word for its sound and significancy deserves to be 
revived, I have that reasonable veneration for antiquity, to restore 
it. All beyond this is superstition. Words are not like landmarks, 
so sacred as never to be removed ; customs are changed, and even 
statutes are silently repealed, when the reason ceases for which they 
were enacted. As for the other part of the argument, that his 
thoughts will lose of their original beauty, by the innovation of 
words; in the first place, not only their beauty but their being is 
lost, where they are no longer understood, which is the present case. 
I grant that something must be lost in all transfusion, that is, in 
all translations ; but the sense will remain, which would otherwise 
be lost, or at least be maimed, when it is scarce intelligible ; and 
that but to a few. How few are there who can read Chaucer, so 
as to understand him perfectly ! And if perfectly, then with less 
profit and no pleasure. 'Tis not for the use of some old Saxon 
friends that I have taken these pains with him : let them neglect 
my version because they have no need of it. I made it for their 
sakes who understand sense and poetry as well as they, when that 
poetry and sense is put into words which they understand. I will 
go farther, and dare to add, that what beauties I lose in some places, 

1 [Many words will be restored which now have fallen out of use, and many 
words will pass which are now in honor — if custom so decrees, in whose power 
is the rule and the law and the pattern of speaking.] 



PREFACE TO THE FABLES 197 

I give to others which had them not originally; but in this I may be 
partial to myself; let the reader judge, and I submit to his decision. 
Yet I think I have just occasion to complain of them, who, because 
they understand Chaucer, would deprive the greater part of their 
countrymen of the same advantage, and hoard him up, as misers 
do their grandam gold, only to look on it themselves, and hinder 
others from making use of it. In sum, I seriously protest, that no 
man ever had, or can have, a greater veneration for Chaucer 
than myself. I have translated some part of his works, only that 
I might perpetuate his memory, or at least refresh it, amongst my 
countrymen. If I have altered him anywhere for the better, I 
must at the same time acknowledge that I could have done nothing 
without him : Facile est inventis addere, 1 is no great commendation ; 
and I am not so vain to think I have deserved a greater. I will 
conclude what I have to say of him singly, with this one remark : 
a lady of my acquaintance, who keeps a kind of correspondence 
with some authors of the fair sex in France, has been informed 
by them that Mademoiselle de Scudery, who is as old as Sibyl, 
and inspired like her by the same god of poetry, is at this time trans- 
lating Chaucer into modern French. From which I gather that 
he has been formerly translated into the old Provencal ; for how she 
should come to understand old English I know not. But the matter 
of fact being true, it makes me think that there is something in it like 
fatality; that, after certain periods of time, the fame and memory 
of great wits should be renewed, as Chaucer is both in France and 
England. If this be wholly chance, 'tis extraordinary, and I dare 
not call it more for fear of being taxed with superstition. 

Boccace comes last to be considered, who, living in the same age 
with Chaucer, had the same genius, and followed the same studies. 
Both writ novels, and each of them cultivated his mother tongue. 
But the greatest resemblance of our two modern authors being in 
their familiar style, and pleasing way of relating comical adven- 
tures, I may pass it over, because I have translated nothing from 
Boccace of that nature. In the serious part of poetry, the advan- 
tage is wholly on Chaucer's side ; for though the Englishman has 
borrowed many tales from the Italian, yet it appears that those of 
Boccace were not generally of his own making, but taken from 
authors of former ages, and by him only modelled; so that what 
there was of invention in either of them may be judged equal. But 
Chaucer has refined on Boccace, and has mended the stories, which 

1 [It is easy to add to what is already there.] 



198 JOHN DRY DEN 

he has borrowed, in his way of telling ; though prose allows more 
liberty of thought, and the expression is more easy when unconfined 
by numbers. Our countryman carries weight, and yet wins the 
race at disadvantage. I desire not the reader should take my word, 
and therefore I will set two of their discourses on the same subject, 
in the same light, for every man to judge betwixt them. I trans- 
lated Chaucer first, and amongst the rest pitched on The Wife of 
BatWs Tale — not daring, as I have said, to adventure on her Pro- 
logue, because it is too licentious. There Chaucer introduces an 
old woman of mean parentage, whom a youthful knight of noble 
blood was forced to marry, and consequently loathed her. The 
crone being in bed with him on the wedding-night, and finding his 
aversion, endeavours to win his affection by reason, and speaks a 
good word for herself (as who could blame her ?) in hope to mollify 
the sullen bridegroom. She takes her topics from the benefits of 
poverty, the advantages of old age and ugliness, the vanity of youth, 
and the silly pride of ancestry and titles without inherent virtue, 
which is the true nobility. When I had closed Chaucer I returned 
to Ovid, and translated some more of his fables ; and by this time 
had so far forgotten The Wife of Bath's Tale that, when I took up 
Boccace, unawares I fell on the same argument of preferring virtue 
to nobility of blood, and titles, in the story of Sigismunda, which I 
had certainly avoided for the resemblance of the two discourses, 
if my memory had not failed me. Let the reader weigh them both, 
and if he thinks me partial to Chaucer, 'tis in him to right Boccace. 
I prefer, in our countryman, far above all his other stories, the 
noble poem of P alamort and Arcite, which is of the epic kind, and 
perhaps not much inferior to the Bias or the JEneis. The story 
is more pleasing than either of them, the manners as perfect, the 
diction as poetical, the learning as deep and various, and the dis- 
position full as artful; only it includes a greater length of time, 
as taking up seven years at least ; but Aristotle has left undecided 
the duration of the action, which yet is easily reduced into the com- 
pass of a year by a narration of what preceded the return of Pala- 
mon to Athens. I had thought for the honour of our nation, and 
more particularly for his whose laurel, though unworthy, I have 
worn after him, that this story was of English growth and Chau- 
cer's own; but I was undeceived by Boccace, for casually looking 
on the end of his seventh Giornata, I found Dioneo (under which 
name he shadows himself) and Fiametta (who represents his mis- 
tress, the natural daughter of Robert, King of Naples), of whom 



PREFACE TO THE FABLES 1 99 

these words are spoken, Dioneo e Fiametta gran pezza contarono 
insieme d'Arcita, e di Palamone; 1 by which it appears that this 
story was written before the time of Boccace ; but the name of its 
author being wholly lost, Chaucer is now become an original, and 
I question not but the poem has received many beauties by passing 
through his noble hands. Besides this tale, there is another of his 
own invention, after the manner of the Provencals, called The 
Flower and the Leaf, with which I was so particularly pleased, both 
for the invention and the moral, that I cannot hinder myself from 
recommending it to the reader. 

As a corollary to this preface, in which I have done justice to 
others, I owe somewhat to myself ; not that I think it worth my time 
to enter the lists with one Milbourn and one Blackmore, but barely 
to take notice that such men there are who have written scurrilously 
against me without any provocation. Milbourn, who is in orders, 
pretends, amongst the rest, this quarrel to me, that I have fallen 
foul on priesthood; if I have, I am only to ask pardon of good 
priests, and am afraid his part of the reparation will come to little. 
Let him be satisfied that he shall not be able to force himself upon 
me for an adversary. I contemn him too much to enter into com- 
petition with him. His own translations of Virgil have answered 
his criticisms on mine. If (as they say, he has declared in print) 
he prefers the version of Ogilby to mine, the world has made him the 
same compliment, for 'tis agreed, on all hands, that he writes even 
below Ogilby. That, you will say, is not easily to be done; but 
what cannot Milbourn bring about ? I am satisfied, however, that 
while he and I live together, I shall not be thought the worst poet 
of the age. It looks as if I had desired him underhand to write 
so ill against me; but upon my honest word, I have not bribed him 
to do me this service, and am wholly guiltless of his pamphlet. 
'Tis true, I should be glad if I could persuade him to continue his 
good offices, and write such another critique on anything of mine; 
for I find by experience he has a great stroke with the reader, 
when he condemns any of my poems, to make the world have a 
better opinion of them. He has taken some pains with my poetry, 
but nobody will be persuaded to take the same with his. If I 
had taken to the church, as he affirms, but which was never in my 
thoughts, I should have had more sense, if not more grace, than to 
have turned myself out of my benefice by writing libels on my 
parishioners. But his account of my manners and my principles 

1 [Dioneo and Fiametta together told a long tale of Arcite and of Palamon.] 



• 



200 JOHN DRYDEN 

are of a piece with his cavils and his poetry ; and so I have done with 
him forever. 

As for the City Bard, or Knight Physician, I hear his quarrel to 
me is, that I was the author of Absalom and Achitophel, which he 
thinks was a little hard on his fanatic patrons in London. 

But I will deal the more civilly with his two poems, because noth- 
ing ill is to be spoken of the dead, and therefore peace be to the 
Manes of his Arthurs. I will only say that it was not for this noble 
knight that I drew the plan of an epic poem on King Arthur in 
my preface to the translation of Juvenal. The guardian angels of 
kingdoms were machines too ponderous for him to manage; and 
therefore he rejected them, as Dares did the whirlbats of Eryx, 
when they were thrown before him by Entellus. Yet from that 
preface he plainly took his hint ; for he began immediately upon his 
story, though he had the baseness not to acknowledge his bene- 
factor; but instead of it, to traduce me in a libel. 

I shall say the less of Mr. Collier, because in many things he has 
taxed me justly, and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and ex- 
pressions of mine which can be truly argued of obscenity, profane- 
ness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let 
him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal 
occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance. It be- 
comes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause when I 
have so often drawn it for a good one. Yet it were not difficult 
to prove that in many places he has perverted my meaning by his 
glosses, and interpreted my words into blasphemy and bawdry, 
of which they were not guilty. Besides that he is too much given 
to horse-play in his raillery, and comes to battle like a dictator from 
the plough. I will not say the zeal of God's house has eaten him 
up, but I am sure it has devoured some part of his good manners 
and civility. It might also be doubted whether it were altogether 
zeal which prompted him to this rough manner of proceeding ; per- 
haps it became not one of his function to rake into the rubbish of 
ancient and modern plays. A divine might have employed his 
pains to better purpose than in the nastiness of Plautus and Aris- 
tophanes, whose examples, as they excuse not me, so it might be 
possibly supposed that he read them not without some pleasure. 
They who have written commentaries on those poets, or on Horace, 
Juvenal, and Martial, have explained some vices which, without their 
interpretation, had been unknown to modern times. Neither has he 
judged impartially betwixt the former age and us. There is more 



PREFACE TO THE FABLES 201 

bawdry in one play of Fletcher's, called The Custom of the Coun- 
try, than in all ours together. Yet this has been often acted on the 
stage in my remembrance. Are the times so much more reformed 
now than they were five and twenty years ago ? If they are, I con- 
gratulate the amendment of our morals. But I am not to preju- 
dice the cause of my fellow-poets, though I abandon my own 
defence: they have some of them answered for themselves, and 
neither they nor I can think Mr. Collier so formidable an enemy 
that we should shun him. He has lost ground at the latter end of 
the day by pursuing his point too far, like the Prince of Conde at 
the battle of Senneffe : from immoral plays to no plays, ab abusu 
ad uswn, non valet consequential But being a party, I am not to 
erect myself into a judge. As for the rest of those who have 
written against me, they are such scoundrels that they deserve 
not the least notice to be taken of them. Blackmore and Milbourn 
are only distinguished from the crowd by being remembered to 
their infamy : — 

— Demetri teque, Tigelli, 

Discipulorum inter jubeo plorare cathedras. 2 

1 [To argue from the abuse of a thing against the use of that thing is inconse- 
quential.] 

2 [You, Demetrius, and you, Tigellus, I bid howl among the seats of the 
learners.] 



IX 

FREDERIC HARRISON 
(1831) 

RUSKIN AS MASTER OF PROSE 

[Chapter II. of Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other Literary Esti- 
mates, 1900.] 

Is it indeed beyond hope that our generation should at last do 
entire justice to our brightest living genius, the most inspiring soul 
still extant amongst us, whilst he may yet be seen and heard in the 
flesh? 

The world has long been of one mind as to the great charm in the 
writings of John Ruskin ; it feels his subtle insight into all forms 
of beauty ; and it has made familiar truisms of his central lessons in 
Art. But it has hardly yet understood that he stands forth now, 
alone and inimitable, as a supreme master of our English tongue; 
that as preacher, prophet (nay, some amongst us do not hesitate 
to say as saint) , he has done more than as master of Art ; that his 
moral and social influence on our time, more than his aesthetic im- 
pulse, will be the chief memory for whiclTour descendants will 
hold him in honour. 

Such genius, such zeal, such self-devotion, should have imposed 
itself upon the age without a dissentient voice ; but the reputation 
of John Ruskin has been exposed to some singular difficulties. 
Above all, he is, to use an Italian phrase, uomo antico: a survival 
of a past age : a man of the thirteenth century pouring out sermons, 
denunciations, rhapsodies to the nineteenth century ; and if Saint 
Bernard himself, in his garb of frieze and girdle of hemp, were to 
preach amongst us in Hyde Park to-day, too many of us would 
listen awhile, and then straightway go about our business with a 
smile. But John Ruskin is not simply a man of the thirteenth cen- 



RUSKIN AS MASTER OF PROSE 203 

tury : he is a poet, a mystic, a missionary of the thirteenth century 
— romantic as was the young Dante in the days of his love and 
his chivalrous youth, and his Florentine rapture in all beautiful 
things, or as was the young Petrarch in the lifetime of his Laura, 
or the young Francis beginning to dream of a regeneration of Chris- 
tendom through the teaching of his barefoot Friars. 

Now John Ruskin not only is in his soul a thirteenth-century 
poet and mystic: but, being this, he would literally have the 
nineteenth century go back to the thirteenth : he means what he 
says: he acts on what he means. And he defies fact, the set of 
many ages, the actual generation around him, and still calls on them, 
alone and in spite of neglect and rebuffs, to go back to the Golden 
Ages of the Past. He would not reject this description of him- 
self : he would proudly accept it. But this being so, it is inevitable 
that much of his teaching — all the teaching for which he cares 
most in his heart — must be in our day the voice of one preaching 
in the wilderness. 

He claims to be not merely poet of the beautiful, but missionary 
of the truth; not so much judge in Art as master in Philosophy. 
And as such he repudiates modern science, modern machinery, 
modern politics — in a sense modern civilization as we know it 
and make it. Not merely is it his ideal to get rid of these ; but in his 
own way he sets himself manfully to extirpate these things in prac- 
tice from the visible life of himself and of those who surround him. 
Such heroic impossibilities recoil on his own head. The nineteenth 
century has been too strong for him. Iron, steam, science, democ- 
racy — have thrust him aside, and have left him in his old age little 
but a solitary and most pathetic Prophet, such as a John the Bap- 
tist by Mantegna, unbending, undismayed, still crying out to a 
scanty band around him — " Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven 
is at hand!" 

I am one who believes most devoutly in the need of repentance, 
and in the ultimate, if not early, advent of a kingdom of the Beau- 
tiful and the Good. But like the world around me, I hold by 
the nineteenth century and not by the thirteenth : — or rather I 
trust that some Century to come may find means of reconciling the 
ages of Steam and the ages of Faith, of combining the best of all 
ages in one. Unluckily, as do other prophets, as do most mystics, 
John Ruskin will have undivided allegiance. With him, it is ever 
— all or none. Accept him and his lesson — wholly, absolutely, 
without murmur or doubt — or he will have none of your homage. 



204 FREDERIC HARRISON 

And the consequence is that his devotees have been neither many, 
nor impressive. His genius, as most men admit, will carry him 
at times into fabulous extravagances, and his exquisite tenderness 
of soul will ofttimes seem to be but a second childhood in the eyes 
of the world. Thus it has come to pass that the grotesque side of 
this noble Evangel of his has been perpetually thrust into the fore- 
front of the fight; and those who have professed to expound the 
Gospel of Ruskin have been for the most part such lads and lasses 
as the world in its grossness regards with impatience, and turns 
from with a smile. 

As one of the oldest and most fervent believers in his genius and 
the noble uses to which he has devoted it, I long to say a word or 
two in support of my belief : not that I have the shadow of a claim 
to speak as his disciple, to defend his utterances, or to represent his 
thoughts. In one sense, no doubt, I stand at an opposite pole of 
ideas, and in literal and direct words, I could hardly adopt any 
one of the leading doctrines of his creed. As to mine, he probably 
rejects everything I hold sacred and true with violent indignation 
and scorn. Morally, spiritually, as seen through a glass darkly, 
I believe that his teachers and my teachers are essentially one, 
and may yet be combined in the greater harmony that is to be. 
But to all this I should despair of inducing him to agree, or even 
to listen with patience. He regards me, I fear, as an utterly lost 
soul, destined to nothing but evil in this world and the next. And 
did he not once long ago, in private communication and in public 
excommunication, consign me to outer darkness, and cover with 
indignant scorn every man and everything in which I have put my 
trust ? 

The world has long been of one mind, I have said, as to the 
beauty of Ruskin's writing; but I venture to think that even yet 
full justice has not been rendered to his consummate mastery over 
our English tongue : that it has not been put high enough, and some 
of its unique qualities have not been perceived. Now I hold that 
in certain qualities, in given ways, and in some rarer passages of 
his, Ruskin not only surpasses every contemporary writer of prose 
(which indeed is obvious enough), but he calls out of our glorious 
English tongue notes more strangely beautiful and inspiring than 
any ever yet issued from that instrument. No writer of prose 
before or since has ever rolled forth such mighty fantasias, or 
reached such pathetic melodies in words, or composed long books 
in one sustained strain of limpid grace. 



RUSKIN AS MASTER OF PROSE 205 

It is indeed very far from a perfect style : much less is it in any 
sense a model style, or one to be cultivated, studied, or followed. 
If any young aspirant were to think it could be imitated, better 
were a millstone hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea. 
No man can bend the bow of Ulysses : and if he dared to take down 
from its long rest the terrible weapon, such an one might give him- 
self an ugly wound. Ulysses himself has shot with it wildly, 
madly, with preposterous overflying of the mark, and blind aiming 
at the wrong target. Ruskin, be it said in sorrow, has too often 
played unseemly pranks on his great instrument: is too often 
"in excess," as the Ethics put it, indeed he is usually "in excess"; 
he has used his mastery in mere exultation in his own mastery; 
and, as he now knows himself, he has used it out of wantonness — 
rarely, but very rarely, as in The Seven Lamps, in a spirit of display, 
or with reckless defiance of sense, good taste, reserve of strength — 
yet never with affectation, never as a tradesman, as a hack. 

We need not enter here on the interminable debate about what 
is called " poetic prose," whether poetic prose be a legitimate form 
of expressing ideas. A good deal of nonsense has been talked about 
it; and the whole matter seems too much a dispute about terms. 
If prose be ornate with flowers of speech inappropriate to the idea 
expressed, or studiously affected, or obtrusively luscious — it is 
bad prose. If the language be proper to verse but improper to 
prose — it is bad prose. If the cadences begin to be obvious, 
if they tend to be actually scanned as verses, if the images are re- 
mote, lyrical, piled over one another, needlessly complicated, if 
the passage has to be read twice before we grasp its meanings — 
then it is bad prose. On the other hand, all ideas are capable of 
being expressed in prose, as well as in verse. They may be clothed 
with as much grace as is consistent with precision. If the sense 
be absolutely clear, the flow of words perfectly easy, the language 
in complete harmony with the thought, then no beauty in the 
phraseology can be misplaced — provided that this beauty is held 
in reserve, is to be unconsciously felt, not obviously thrust forward, 
and is always the beauty of prose, and not the beauty of verse. 

It cannot be denied that Ruskin, especially in his earlier works, 
is too often obtrusively luscious, that his images are often lyrical, 
set in too profuse and gorgeous a mosaic. Be it so. But he is 
always perfectly, transparently clear, absolutely free from affected 
euphuism, never laboriously "precious," never grotesque, never 
eccentric. His besetting sins as a master of speech may be summed 



206 FREDERIC HARRISON 

up in his passion for profuse imagery, and delight in an almost 
audible melody of words. But how different is this from the 
laborious affectation of what is justly condemned as the "poetic 
prose" of a writer who tries to be fine, seeking to perform feats of 
composition, who flogs himself into a bastard sort of poetry, not 
because he enjoys it, but to impose upon an ignorant reader ! 
This Ruskin never does. When he bursts the bounds of fine taste, 
and pelts us with perfumed flowers till we almost faint under their 
odour and their blaze of colour, it is because he is himself intoxi- 
cated with the joy of his blossoming thoughts, and would force 
some of his divine afflatus into our souls. The priestess of the 
Delphic god never spoke without inspiration, and then did not use 
the flat speech of daily life. Would that none ever spoke in books, 
until they felt the god working in their heart. 

To be just, we should remember that a very large part of all that 
Ruskin treats concerns some scene of beauty, some work of fine 
art, some earnest moral exhortation, some indignant rebuke to 
meanness, — wherein passionate delight and passionate appeal are 
not merely lawful, but are of the essence of the lesson. Ruskin 
is almost always in an ecstasy of admiration, or in a fervour of 
sympathy, or in a grand burst of prophetic warning. It is his mis- 
sion, his nature, his happiness so to be. And it is inevitable that 
such passion and eagerness should be clothed in language more re- 
mote from the language of conversation than is that of Swift or 
Hume. The language of the preacher is not, nor ought it to be, 
the language of the critic, the philosopher, the historian. Ruskin 
is a preacher : right or wrong he has to deliver his message, whether 
men will stay to hear it or not; and we can no more require him 
to limit his pace to the plain foot-plodding of unimpassioned prose 
than we can ask this of Saint Bernard, or of Bossuet, of Jeremy 
Taylor or Thomas Carlyle. 

Besides all this, Ruskin has shown that, where the business in 
hand is simple instruction, philosophical argument, or mechanical 
exposition, he is master of an English style of faultless ease, sim- 
plicity, and point. When he wants to describe a plain thing, a 
particular instrument for drawing, a habit of Turner's work, the 
exact form of a boat, or a tower, or a shell, no one can surpass him, 
or equal him, in the clearness and precision of his words. His 
little book on the Elements of Drawing is a masterpiece in lucid 
explanation of simple mechanical rules and practices. Prceterita, 
Fors Clavigera, and the recent notes to reprinted works, contain 



RUSKIN AS MASTER OF PROSE 207 

easy bits of narration, of banter, of personal humour, that Swift, 
Defoe, Goldsmith, and Lamb might envy. Turn to that much- 
abused book, Unto this Last — the central book of his life, as it is 
the turning-point of his career — it is almost wholly free from 
every fault of excess with which he has been charged. Men may 
differ as to the argument. But no capable critic will doubt that 
as a type of philosophical discussion, its form is as fine and as 
pure as the form of Berkeley or of Hume. 

But when, his whole soul aglow with some scene of beauty, 
transfigured by a profound moral emotion, he breaks forth into 
one of those typical descants of his, our judgment may still doubt if 
the colouring be not overcharged and the composition too crowded 
for perfect art, but we are carried away by its beauty, its rhythm, 
its pathos. We know that the sentence is too long, preposterously, 
impossibly sustained — 200 words and more — 250, nay, 280 
words without a single pause — each sentence with 40, 50, 60 
commas, colons, and semicolons — and yet the whole symphony 
flows on with such just modulation, the images melt so naturally 
into each other, the harmony of tone and the ease of words are 
so complete, that we hasten through the passage in a rapture of 
admiration. Milton often began, and once or twice completed, 
such a resounding voluntary on his glorious organ. But neither 
Milton, nor Browne, nor Jeremy Taylor, was yet quite master of 
the mighty instrument. Ruskin, who comes after two centuries 
of further and continuous progress in this art, is master of the subtle 
instrument of prose. And though it be true that too often, in 
wanton defiance of calm judgment, he will fling to the winds his 
self-control, he has achieved in this rare and perilous art some 
amazing triumphs of mastery over language, such as the whole 
history of our literature cannot match. 

Lovers of Ruskin. (that is all who read good English books) can 
recall, and many of them can repeat, hundreds of such passages, 
and they will grumble at an attempt to select any passage at all. 
But to make njy meaning clear, I will turn to one or two very 
famous bits, not at all asserting that they are the most truly noble 
passages that Ruskin ever wrote, but as specimens of his more 
lyrical mood. He has himself spoken with slight of much of his 
earlier writing — often perhaps with undeserved humility. He 
especially regrets the purpurei panni, 1 as he calls them, of The 
Seven Lamps and cognate pieces. I will not quote any of these 

1 [Purple rags.] 



208 FREDERIC HARRISON 

purpurei panni, though I think that as rhetorical prose, as apodeictic 
perorations, English literature has nothing to compare with them. 
But they are rhetorical, somewhat artificial, manifest displays of 
eloquence — and we shall all agree that eloquent displays of rhet- 
oric are not the best specimens of prose composition. 

I take first a well-known piece of an early book {Modern Painters, 
Vol. IV. c. i., 1856), the old Tower of Calais Church, a piece which 
has haunted my memory for nearly forty years : — 

"The large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it; the record of its years 
written so visibly, yet without sign of weakness or decay ; its stern wasteness 
and gloom, eaten away by the Channel winds, and overgrown with the bitter 
sea grasses; its slates and tiles all shaken and rent, and yet not falling; its 
desert of brickwork, full of bolts, and holes, and ugly fissures, and yet strong, 
like a bare brown rock; its carelessness of what any one thinks or feels 
about it ; putting forth no claim, having no beauty, nor desirableness, pride, 
nor grace ; yet neither asking for pity ; not, as ruins are, useless and piteous, 
feebly or fondly garrulous of better days ; but useful still, going through its 
own daily work, — as some old fisherman, beaten gray by storm, yet draw- 
ing his daily nets: so it stands, with no complaint about its past youth, in 
blanched and meagre massiveness and serviceableness, gathering human 
souls together underneath it; the sound of its bells for prayer still rolling 
through its rents ; and the gray peak of it seen far across the sea, principal of 
the three that rise above the waste of surfy sand and hillocked shore, — the 
lighthouse for life, and the belfry for labour, and this — for patience and 
praise." 

This passage I take to be one of the most magnificent examples of 
the ' ' pathetic fallacy " in our language. Perhaps the ' ' pathetic fal- 
lacy " is second-rate art ; the passage is too long — 211 words alas ! 
without one full stop, and more than forty commas and other marks 
of punctuation — it has trop de choses — it has redundancies, 
tautologies, and artifices, if we are strictly severe — but what a 
picture, what pathos, what subtlety of observation, what nobility 
of association — and withal how complete is the unity of impres- 
sion ! How mournful, how stately is the cadence, most harmonious 
and yet peaceful is the phraseology, and how wonderfully do 
thought, the antique history, the picture, the musical bars of the 
whole piece combine in beauty ! What fine and just images — 
"the large neglect," the " noble unsightliness." The tower is 
" eaten away by the Channel winds," "overgrown with bitter sea 
grasses." It is "careless," "puts forth no claim," has "no pride," 
does not "ask for pity," is not "fondly garrulous," as other ruins 
are, but still goes through its work, "like some old fisherman." 
It stands blanched, meagre, massive, but still serviceable, making 



RUSKIN AS MASTER OF PROSE 209 

no complaint about its past youth. A wonderful bit of word-paint- 
ing — and, perhaps, word-painting, at least on a big canvas, is 
not strictly lawful — but such a picture as few poets and no prose- 
writer has surpassed ! Byron would have painted it in deeper, 
fiercer strokes. Shelley and Wordsworth would have been less 
definite. Coleridge would not have driven home the moral so 
earnestly; though Tennyson might have embodied it in the 
stanzas of In Memoriam. 

I should like to take this passage as a text to point to a quality 
of Ruskin's prose in which, I believe, he has surpassed all other 
writers. It is the quality of musical assonance. There is plenty 
of alliteration in Ruskin, as there is in all fine writers: but the 
musical harmony of sound in Ruskin's happiest efforts is some- 
thing very different from alliteration, and much more subtle. 
Coarse, obtrusive, artificial alliteration, i.e. the recurrence of words 
with the same initial letter, becomes, when crudely treated or over- 
done, a gross and irritating form of affectation. But the prejudice 
against alliteration may be carried too far. Alliteration is the 
natural expression of earnest feeling in every form — it is a physio- 
logical result of passion and impetuosity : — it becomes a defect 
when it is repeated too often, or in an obtrusive way, or when it 
becomes artificial, and studied. Whilst alliteration is spontane- 
ous, implicit not explicit, felt not seen, the natural working of a 
fine ear, it is not only a legitimate expedient both of prose and of 
verse, but is an indispensable accessory of the higher harmonies, 
whether of verse or prose. 

Ruskin uses alliteration much (it must be admitted, in profu- 
sion) , but he relies on a far subtler resource of harmony — that is 
assonance, or as I should prefer to name it, consonance. I have 
never seen this quality treated at all systematically, but I am con- 
vinced that it is at the basis of all fine cadences both in verse and 
in prose. By consonance I mean the recurrence of the same, or of 
cognate, sounds, not merely in the first letter of words, but where 
the stress comes, in any part of a word, and that in sounds whether 
vowel or consonant. Grimm's law of interchangeable consonants 
applies; and all the well-known groupings of consonants may be 
noted. The liquids connote the sweeter, the gutturals the sterner 
ideas; the sibilants connect and organize the words. Of poets 
perhaps Milton, Shelley, and Tennyson make the fullest use of this 
resource. We need not suppose that it is consciously sought, or in 
any sense studied, or even observed by the poet. But consonance, 



210 FREDERIC HARRISON 

i.e. recurrence of the same or kindred sounds, is very visible when 
we look for it in a beautiful cadence. Take Tennyson's — 

Old Yew, which graspest at the stones 

That name the under-lying dead, 

Thy fibres net the dreamless head, 
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones. 

How much does the music, nay the impressiveness, of this stanza 
depend on consonance! The great booming O with which it 
opens, is repeated in the last word of the first, and also of the last 
line. The cruel word "graspest" is repeated in part in the harsh 
word " stones." Three lines, and six words in all, begin with the 
soft "th": "name" is echoed by "net," "under-lying" by 
"dreamless"; the "r" of "roots" is heard again in "wrapt," 
the "b" in "fibres," in "about," and "bones." These are not 
at all accidental cases of consonance. 

This musical consonance is quite present in fine prose, although 
many powerful writers seem to have had but little ear for its 
effects. Such men as Swift, Defoe, Gibbon, Macaulay, seldom 
advance beyond alliteration in the ordinary sense. But true 
consonance, or musical correspondence of note, is very perceptible 
in the prose of Milton, of Sir Thomas Browne, of Burke, of Cole- 
ridge, of De Quincey. Above all, it is especially marked in our 
English Bible, and in the Collects and grander canticles of the 
Prayer Book; and is the source of much of their power over us. 
Of all the masters of prose literature, John Ruskin has made 
the finest use of this resource, and with the most delicate and 
mysterious power. And this is no doubt due to his mind being 
saturated from childhood with the harmonies of our English 
Bible, and to his speaking to us with religious solemnity and in 
Biblical tones. 

This piece about the tower of Calais Church is full of this 
beautiful and subtle form of alliteration or colliteration — "the 
large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it" — "the record of its 
years written so visibly, yet without sign of weakness or decay" 
— "the sound of its bells for prayer still rolling through its rents." 
Here in a single line are three liquid double "11"; there are six 
"s"; there are are five "r" in seven words — "sound rolling 
through rents" is finely expressive of a peal of bells. And the 
passage ends with a triple alliteration — the second of the three 
being inverted: "bel" echoing to "lab" — "the lighthouse for 



RCJSKIN AS MASTER OF PROSE 211 

life, and the belfry for labour, and this — for patience and 
praise." 

Turn to another famous passage (Modern Painters, Vol. IV. 
cap. 19), a somewhat overwrought, possibly unjust picture, 
stained as usual with the original sin of Calvinism, but a wonderful 
piece of imaginative description. It is the account of the peasant 
of the Valais, in the grand chapter on " Mountain Gloom." 

"They do not understand so much as the name of beauty, or of knowledge. 
They understand dimly that of virtue. Love, patience, hospitality, faith, — 
these things they know. To glean their meadows side by side, so happier; 
to bear the burden up the breathless mountain flank unmurmuringly; to 
bid the stranger drink from their vessel of milk ; to see at the foot of their low 
death-beds a pale figure upon a cross, dying, also patiently ; — in this they 
are different from the cattle and from the stones ; but, in all this, unrewarded, 
so far as concerns the present life. For them, there is neither hope nor pas- 
sion of spirit ; for them, neither advance nor exultation. Black bread, rude 
roof, dark night, laborious day, weary arm at sunset; and life ebbs away. 
No books, no thoughts, no attainments, no rest, — except only sometimes a 
little sitting in the sun under the church wall, as the bell tolls thin and far 
in the mountain air ; a pattering of a few prayers, not understood, by the altar- 
rails of the dimly gilded chapel, — and so, back to the sombre home, with the 
cloud upon them still unbroken — that cloud of rocky gloom, born out of the 
wild torrents and ruinous stones, and unlightened even in their religion, ex- 
cept by the vague promise of some better things unknown, mingled with 
threatening, and obscured by an unspeakable horror — a smoke, as it were, 
of martyrdom, coiling up with the incense ; and amidst the images of tortured 
bodies and lamenting spirits in hurtling flames, the very cross, for them, dashed 
more deeply than for others with gouts of blood." 

The piece is over-wrought as well as unjust, with somewhat 
false emphasis, but how splendid in colour and majestic in lan- 
guage! "To bear the burden up the breathless mountain flank 
unmurmuringly" — is fine in spite of its obvious scansion and 
its profuse alliteration. "At their low death-beds a pale figure 
upon a cross, dying, also patiently" — will not scan, and it is 
charged with solemnity by soft "1," "d," and "p" repeated. 
How beautifully imitative is the line, "as the bell tolls thin and 
far in the mountain air " — a, e, i, o, u — with ten monosyllables 
and one dissyllable! "The cross dashed more deeply with gouts 
of blood." No one who has ever read that passage can pass along the 
Catholic valleys of the Swiss Alps without having it in his mind. 
Overcharged, and somewhat consciously and designedly pictorial 
as it is, it is a truly wonderful example of mastery over language 
and sympathetic insight. • 

We may turn now to a passage or two, in which perhaps Ruskin 



212 FREDERIC HARRISON 

is quite at his best. He has written few things finer, and indeed 
more exactly truthful, than his picture of the Campagna of Rome. 
This is in the Preface to the second edition of Modern Painters, 
1843. 

"Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the solitary 
extent of the Campagna of Rome under evening light. Let the reader im- 
agine himself for the moment withdrawn from the sounds and motion of the 
living world, and sent forth alone into this wild and wasted plain. The earth 
yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he never so lightly, for its sub- 
stance is white, hollow, and carious, like the dusty wreck of the bones of 
men. The long knotted grass waves and tosses feebly in the evening wind, 
and the shadows of its motion shake feverishly along the banks of ruin that 
lift themselves to the sunlight. Hillocks of mouldering earth heave around 
him, as if the dead beneath were struggling in their sleep. Scattered blocks 
of black stone, four-square remnants of mighty edifices, not one left upon 
another, lie upon them to keep them down. A dull purple poisonous haze 
stretches level along the desert, veiling its spectral wrecks of massy ruins, 
on whose rents the red light rests, like dying fire on denied altars ; the blue 
ridge of the Alban Mount lifts itself against a solemn space of green, clear, quiet 
sky. Watch-towers of dark clouds stand steadfastly along the promontories 
of the Apennines. From the plain to the mountains, the shattered aqueducts, 
pier beyond pier, melt into the darkness, like shadowy and countless troops of 
funeral mourners, passing from a nation's grave." 

Here is a piece of pure description without passion or moraliz- 
ing; the passage is broken, as we find in all good modern prose, 
into sentences of forty or fifty words. It is absolutely clear, 
literally true, an imaginative picture of one of the most impres- 
sive scenes in the world. All who know it, remember "the white, 
hollow, carious earth," like bone dust, "the long knotted grass," 
the " banks of ruin " and " hillocks of mouldering earth," the "dull 
purple poisonous haze," "the shattered aqueducts," like shadowy 
mourners at a nation's grave. The whole piece may be set beside 
Shelley's poem from the "Euganean Hills," and it produces a 
kindred impression. In Ruskin's prose, perhaps for the first 
time in literature, there are met the eye of the landscape painter 
and the voice of the lyric poet — and both are blended in per- 
fection. It seems to me idle to debate, whether or not it is legiti- 
mate to describe in prose a magnificent scene, whether it be lawful 
to set down in prose the ideas which this scene kindles in an imagi- 
native soul, whether it be permitted to such an artist to resort 
to any resource of grace or power which the English language 
can present. 

This magnificent piece of word-painting is hardly surpassed by 



RUSKIN AS MASTER OF PROSE 213 

anything in our literature. It cannot be said to carry allitera- 
tion to the point of affectation. But the reader may easily per- 
ceive by analysis how greatly its musical effect depends on pro- 
fusion of subtle consonance. The "liquids" give grace: the 
broad and a, and their diphthong sounds, give solemnity: the 
gutturals and double consonants give strength. "A dull purple 
poisonous haze stretches level along the desert" — "on whose 
rents the red light rests like dying fire on defiled altars." Here 
in thirteen words are — five r, four t, four d, three 1, — "Dark 
clouds stand steadfastly" — " the promontories of the Apennines." 
The last clause is a favourite cadence of Ruskin's: its beautiful 
melody depends on a very subtle and complex scheme of conso- 
nance. "From the plain to the mountains, the shattered aque- 
ducts, pier beyond pier, melt into the darkness, like shadowy 
and countless troops of funeral mourners, passing from a nation's 
grave." It is impossible to suppose that the harmonies of this 
"coda" are wholly accidental. They are the effect of a wonderful 
ear for tonality in speech, certainly unconscious, arising from 
passionate feeling more than from reflection. And Mr. Ruskin 
himself would no doubt be the first to deny that such a thought 
had ever crossed his mind ; — perhaps he would himself denounce 
with characteristic vehemence any such vivisection applied to his 
living and palpitating words. 

I turn now to a little book of his written in the middle of his 
life, at the height of his power, just before he entered on his second 
career of social philosopher and new evangelist. The Harbours 
of England was published nearly forty years ago in 1856 {cetat. 37), 
and it has now been happily reprinted in a cheap and smaller 
form, 1895. It is, I believe, as an education in art, as true, and 
as masterly as anything Ruskin ever wrote. But I wish now to 
treat it only from the point of view of English literature. And I 
make bold to say that no book in our language shows more varied 
resources over prose-writing, or an English more pure, more 
vigorous, more enchanting. It contains hardly any of those 
tirades with which the preacher loves to drench his hearers — 
torrents from the fountains of his ecstasy, or his indignation. The 
book is full of enthusiasm and of poetry: but it also contains a 
body of critical and expository matter — simple, lucid, graceful, 
incisive as anything ever set down by the hand of John Ruskin, 
or indeed of any other master of our English prose. 

Every one remembers the striking sentence with which it opens 



214 FREDERIC HARRISON 

— a sentence, it may be, exaggerated in meaning, but how melo- 
dious, how impressive — "Of all things, living or lifeless [note 
the five 1, the four i, in the first six words], upon this strange earth, 
there is but one which, having reached the mid-term of appointed 
human endurance on it, I still regard with unmitigated amaze- 
ment." This object is the bow of a Boat, — "the blunt head 
of a common, bluff, undecked sea-boat lying aside in its furrow 
of beach sand. ..." 

"The sum of Navigation is in that. You may magnify it or decorate it as 
you will : you will not add to the wonder of it. Lengthen it into hatchet-like 
edge of iron, — strengthen it with complex tracery of ribs of oak, — carve it 
and gild it till a column of light moves beneath it on the sea, — you have 
made no more of it than it was at first. That rude simplicity of bent plank, 
that [? should be 'which'] can breast its way through the death that is in the 
deep sea, has in it the soul of shipping. Beyond this, we may have more 
work, more men, more money; we cannot have more miracle." 

The whole passage is loaded with imagery, with fancy, but 
hardly with conceits; it is wonderfully ingenious, impressive, 
suggestive, so that a boat is never quite the same thing to any one 
who has read this passage in early life. The ever-changing 
curves of the boat recall "the image of a sea-shell." "Every 
plank is a Fate, and has men's lives wreathed in the knots of it." 
This bow of the boat is "the gift of another world." Without it, 
we should be "chained to our rocks." The very nails that fasten 
the planks are "the rivets of the fellowship of the world." "Their 
iron does more than draw lightning out of heaven, it leads love 
round the earth." It is possible to call this fantastic, over- 
wrought, lyrical : it is not possible to dispute its beauty, charm, 
and enthusiasm. It seems to me to carry imaginative prose ex- 
actly to that limit which to pass would cease to be fitting in prose ; 
to carry fancy to the very verge of that which, if less sincere, less 
true, less pathetic, would justly be regarded as Euphuistic conceit. 

And so this splendid hymn to the sea-boat rolls on to that 
piece which I take to be as fine and as true as anything ever said 
about the sea, even by our sea poets, Byron or Shelley: — 

"Then, also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the enemy 
that it does battle with. To lift dead weight ; to overcome length of languid 
space ; to multiply or systematize a given force ; this we may see done by the 
bar, or beam, or wheel, without wonder. But to war with that living fury of 
waters, to bare its breast, moment after moment, against the unwearied enmity 
of ocean, — the subtle, fitful, implacable smiting of the black waves, provok- 



RUSKIN AS MASTER OF PROSE 215 

ing each other on, endlessly, all the infinite march of the Atlantic rolling on 
behind them to their help, and still to strike them back into a wreath of smoke 
and futile foam,, and win its way against them, and keep its charge of life from 
them; — does any other soulless thing do as much as this?" 

This noble paragraph has truth, originality, music, majesty, 
with that imitative power of sound which is usually thought to 
be possible only in poetry, and is very rarely successful even in 
poetry. Homer has often caught echoes of the sea in his majestic 
hexameters; Byron and Shelley occasionally recall it; as does 
Tennyson in its milder moods and calm rest. But I know no 
other English prose but this which, literally and nobly describing 
the look of a wild sea, suggests in the very rhythm of its cadence, 
and in the music of its roar, the tumultuous surging of the surf — ■ 
"To war with that living fury of waters" — "the subtle, fitful, 
implacable smiting of the black waves," — "still to strike them 
back into a wreath of smoke and futile foam, and win its way 
against them." Here we seem not only to see before our eyes, 
but to hear with our ears, the crash of a stout boat plunging 
through a choppy sea off our southern coasts. 

I would take this paragraph as the high-water mark of Ruskin's 
prose method. But there are scores and hundreds of passages 
in his books of equal power and perfection. This book on The 
Harbours of England is full of them. O si sic omnia ! l Alas ! 
a few pages further on, even of this admirable book which is so 
free from them, comes one of those ungovernable, over-laden, 
hypertrophied outbursts of his, which so much deform his earlier 
books. It is a splendid piece of conception: each phrase, each 
sentence, is beautiful; the images are appropriate and cognate; 
they flow naturally out of each other; and the whole has a most 
harmonious glow. But alas ! as English prose, it is impossible. 
It has 255 words without a pause, and 26 intermediate signs of 
punctuation. No human breath could utter such a sentence: 
even the eye is bewildered; and, at last, the most docile and 
attentive reader sinks back, stunned and puzzled by such a torrent 
of phrases and such a wilderness of thoughts. 2 

He is speaking of the fisher-boat as the most venerable kind 

1 [Oh, if all were thus !] 

2 In the second volume of Modem Painters, p. 132, may be found a mammoth 
sentence, I suppose the most gigantic sentence in English prose. It has 619 words 
without a full stop, and 80 intermediate signs of punctuation, together with four 
clauses in brackets. It has been reprinted in the revised two volumes edition of 
1883, where it fills four whole pages, i. 347-351. 



2l6 FREDERIC HARRISON 

of ship. He stands musing on the shingle between the black 
sides of two stranded fishing-boats. He watches "the clear heavy 
water-edge of ocean rising and falling close to their bows." And 
then he turns to the boats. 

" And the dark flanks of the fishing-boats all aslope above, in their shining 
quietness, hot in the morning sun, rusty and seamed, with square patches of 
plank nailed over their rents; just rough enough to let the little flat-footed 
fisher-children haul or twist themselves up to the gunwales, and drop back 
again along some stray rope ; just round enough to remind us, in their broad 
and gradual curves, of the sweep of the green surges they know so well, and 
of the hours when those old sides of seared timber, all ashine with the sea, 
plunge and dip into the deep green purity of the mounded waves more joyfully 
than a deer lies down among the grass of Spring, the soft white cloud of foam 
opening momentarily at the bows, and fading or flying high into the breeze 
where the sea-gulls toss and shriek, — the joy and beauty of it, all the while, 
so mingled with the sense of unfathomable danger, and the human effort and 
sorrow going on perpetually from age to age, waves rolling forever, and 
winds moaning forever, and faithful hearts trusting and sickening forever, 
and brave lives dashed away about the rattling beach like weeds forever ; and 
still at the helm of every lonely boat, through starless night and hopeless 
dawn, His hand, who spread the fisher's net over the dust of the Sidonian 
palaces, and gave into the fisher's hand the keys of the kingdom of heaven." 

It is a grand passage, ruined, I think, by excess of eagerness 
and sympathetic passion. Neither Shelley nor Keats ever flung 
his soul more keenly into an inert object and made it live to us, 
or rather, lived in it, felt its heart beat in his, and made his own 
its sorrows, its battles, its pride. So Tennyson gazing on the 
Yew which covers the loved grave cries out — 

"I seem to fail from out my blood 
And grow incorporate into thee." 

So the poet sees the ship that brings his lost Arthur home, hears 
the noise about the keel, and the bell struck in the night. Thus 
Ruskin, watching the fisherman's boat upon the beach, sees in 
his mind's eye the past and the future of the boat, the swell of the 
green billows, and the roar of the ocean, and still at the helm, 
unseen but of him, an Almighty Hand guiding it in life and in 
death. 

Had this noble vision been rehearsed with less passion, and in 
sober intervals of breathing, we could have borne it. The first 
twelve or fourteen lines, ending with "the deep green purity of 
the mounded waves," form a full picture. But, like a runaway 
horse, our poet plunges on where no human lungs and no ordinary 



RUSKIN AS MASTER OF PROSE 21 J 

brain can keep up the giddy pace; and for seven or eight lines 
more we are pelted with new images till we feel like landsmen 
caught in a sudden squall. And then how grand are the last ten 
lines — "the human effort and sorrow going on perpetually from 
age to age " — ! down to that daring antithesis of the fishermen 
of Tyre and the fisherman of St. Peter's ! I cannot call it a con- 
ceit: but it would have been a conceit in the hands of any one 
less sincere, less passionate, not so perfectly saturated with Biblical 
imagery and language. 

I have dwelt upon this passage as a typical example of Ruskin's 
magnificent power over the literary instrument, of his intense 
sympathy, of his vivid imagination, and alas ! also of his ungov- 
ernable flux of ideas and of words. It is by reason of this wilful 
megalomania and plethoric habit, that we must hesitate to pro- 
nounce him the greatest master of English prose in our whole 
literature: but it is such mastery over language, such power to 
triumph over almost impossible conditions and difficulties, that 
compel us to regard him as one who could have become the noblest 
master of prose ever recorded, if he would only have set himself 
to curb his Pegasus from the first, and systematically to think of 
his reader's capacity for taking in, as well as of his own capacity 
for pouring forth, a torrent of glowing thoughts. 

As a matter of fact, John Ruskin himself undertook to curb 
his Pegasus, and, like Turner or Beethoven, distinctly formed 
and practised "a second manner." That second manner coin- 
cides with the great change in his career, when he passed from 
critic of art to be social reformer and moral philosopher. The 
change was of course not absolute; but whereas, in the earlier 
half of his life, he had been a writer about Beauty and Art, who 
wove into his teaching lessons on social, moral, and religious 
problems, so he became, in the later part of his life, a worker about 
Society and Ethics, who filled his practical teaching with judg- 
ments about the beautiful in Nature and in Art. That second 
career dates from about the year i860, when he began to write 
Unto this Last, which was finally published in 1862. 

I myself judge that book to be not only the most original and 
creative work of John Ruskin, but the most original and creative 
work in pure literature since Sartor Resartus. But I am now 
concerning myself with form: and, as a matter of form, I would 
point to it as a work containing almost all that is noble in Ruskin's 
written prose, with hardly any, or very few, of his excesses and 



218 FREDERIC HARRISON 

mannerisms. It is true, that, pp. 147-8, we have a single sentence 
of 242 words and 52 intermediate stops before we come to the 
pause. But this is occasional; and the book as a whole is a 
masterpiece of pure, incisive, imaginative, lucid English. If one 
had to plead the cause of Ruskin before the Supreme Court in 
the Republic of Letters, one would rely on that book as a type 
of clearness, wit, eloquence, versatility, passion. 

From the publication of Unto this Last, in 1862, John Ruskin 
distinctly adopted his later manner. Two volumes of selections 
from Ruskin's works were published in 1893 by George Allen, 
the compilation of some anonymous editor. They are of nearly 
equal size and of periods of equal length. The first series consists 
of extracts between 1843 an d i860 from Modern Painters, Seven 
Lamps, Stones of Venice, and minor lectures, articles, and letters 
anterior to i860. The second series, 1 860-1 888, contains selec- 
tions from Unto this Last, Fors, Prceterita, and the lectures and 
treatises subsequent to i860. Now, it will be seen that in the 
second series the style is more measured, more mature, more 
practical, more simple. It is rare to find the purpurei panni 
which abound in the first series, or the sentences of 200 words, or 
the ostentatious piling up of luscious imagery, and tumultuous 
fugues in oral symphony. The " first state" of a plate by Ruskin 
has far richer effects and more vivid light and shade than any 
example of his "second state." 

Alas ! the change came too late — too late in his life, too late 
in his career. When Unto this Last was finally published, John 
Ruskin was forty-three : he had already written the most elaborate 
and systematic of all his books — those on which his world-wide 
fame still rests. He had long past il mezzo del cammin di nostra 
vita l — and even the middle of his own long life : his energy, 
his health, his hopes, were not what they had been in his glorious 
youth and early manhood: his mission became consciously to 
raise men's moral standard in life, not to raise their sense of the 
beautiful in Art. The old mariner still held us with his glistening 
eye, and forced us to listen to his wondrous tale, but he spoke like a 
man whose voice shook with the memory of all that he had seen 
and known, over whom the deep waters had passed. I am one 
of those who know that John Ruskin has told us in his second 
life things more true and more important even than he told us 
in his first life. But yet I cannot bring myself to hold that, as 

1 [The middle of the highway of our life.] 



RUSKIN AS MASTER OF PROSE 219 

magician of words, his later teaching has the mystery and the 
glory which hung round the honeyed lips of the " Oxford graduate." 
If, then, John Ruskin be not in actual achievement the greatest 
master who ever wrote in English prose, it is only because he 
refused to chasten his passion arid his imagination until the prime 
of life was past. A graceful poet and a great moralist said : — 

"Prune thou thy words; the thoughts control 
That o'er thee swell and throng: — 
They will condense within thy soul, 
And change to purpose strong." 

This lesson Ruskin never learned until he was growing gray, and 
even now he only observes it so long as the spirit moves him, or 
rather does not move him too keenly. He has rarely suffered 
his thoughts to condense within his soul. Far from controlling 
them, he has spurred and lashed them into fury, so that they swell 
and throng over him and his readers, too often changing into 
satiety and impotence. Every other faculty of a great master 
of speech, except reserve, husbanding of resources, and patience, 
he possesses in measure most abundant — lucidity, purity, bril- 
liance, elasticity, wit, fire, passion, imagination, majesty, with a 
mastery over all the melody of cadence that has no rival in the 
whole range of English literature. 



X 

CHARLES LAMB 
(1775-1834) 

ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation. 

[Published in 181 1 in Hunt's Reflector.'] 

Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the 
affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have 
seen before, and which upon examination proved to be a whole- 
length of the celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not go so 
far with some good Catholics abroad as to shut players altogether 
out of consecrated ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalized 
at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set 
apart to remind us of the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found 
inscribed under this harlequin figure the following lines : — 

To paint fair Nature, by divine command, 
Her magic pencil in his glowing hand, 
A Shakespeare rose : then, to expand his fame 
Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came. 
Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew, 
The Actor's genius made them breathe anew; 
Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay, 
Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day: 
And till Eternity with power sublime 
Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time, 
Shakespeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine, 
And earth irradiate with a beam divine. 

It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to attempt 
anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and non- 
sense. But the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder, how 
from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should have 



TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 221 

been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that 
has had the luck to please the town in any of the great characters 
of Shakespeare, with the notion of possessing a mind congenial 
with the poet's: how people should come thus unaccountably 
to confound the power of originating poetical images and concep- 
tions with the faculty of being able to read or recite the same when 
put into words ; x or what connection that absolute mastery over the 
heart and soul of man, which a great dramatic poet possesses, has 
with those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which a player by ob- 
serving a few general effects, which some common passion, as grief, 
anger, &c, usually has upon the gestures and exterior, can so easily 
compass. To know the internal workings and movements of a 
great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for instance, the when and 
the why and the how far they should be moved; to what pitch a 
passion is becoming; to give the reins and to pull in the curb ex- 
actly at the moment when the drawing in or the slacking is most 
graceful ; seems to demand a reach of intellect of a vastly different 
extent from that which is employed upon the bare imitation of the 
signs of these passions in the countenance or gesture, which signs 
are usually observed to be most lively and emphatic in the weaker 
sort of minds, and which signs can after all but indicate some pas- 
sion, as I said before, anger, or grief, generally ; but of the motives 
and grounds of the passion, wherein it differs from the same passion 
in low and vulgar natures, of these the actor can give no more idea 
by his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, 
or the muscles utter intelligible sounds. But such is the instantane- 
ous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear 
at a playhouse, compared with the slow apprehension oftentimes 
of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only to sink 
the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, but 
even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, the actor with 
the character which he represents. It is difficult for a frequent 
play-goer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person 
and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in 
reality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion incidental alone 

1 It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in dramatic recitations. 
We never dream that the gentleman who reads Lucretius in public with great ap- 
plause, is therefore a great poet and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davies, 
the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the Paradise Lost better than any 
man in England in his day (though I cannot help thinking there must be some 
mistake in this tradition) was therefore, by his intimate friends, set upon a level 
with Milton. 



222 CHARLES LAMB 

to unlettered persons, who, not possessing the advantage of read- 
ing, are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player for all the 
pleasure which they can receive from the drama, and to whom the 
very idea of what an author is cannot be made comprehensible 
without some pain and perplexity of mind : the error is one from 
which persons otherwise not meanly lettered, find it almost impos- 
sible to extricate themselves. 

Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of 
satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the 
first time a tragedy of Shakespeare performed, in which those two 
great performers sustained the principal parts. It seemed to em- 
body and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no dis- 
tinct shape. But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile 
pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we 
find to our cost that, instead of realizing an idea, we have only 
materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh 
and blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable 
substance. 

How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free con- 
ceptions thus cramped and pressed down to the measure of a strait- 
lacing actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of 
freshness, with which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare which 
have escaped being performed, and to those passages in the acting 
plays of the same writer which have happily been left out in the per- 
formance. How far the very custom of hearing anything spouted, 
withers and blows upon a fine passage, may be seen in those 
speeches from Henry the Fifth, &c, which are current in the mouths 
of school-boys from their being to be found in Enfield Speakers, 
and such kind of books. I confess myself utterly unable to appre- 
ciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning "To be or not 
to be," or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been 
so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and 
torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity 
in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member. 

It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that 
the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a 
stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their 
distinguishing excellence is a reason that they should be so. There 
is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, 
with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do. 

The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns 



TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 223 

of passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the 
more hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer 
obviously possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where 
two persons talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surpris- 
ing manner talk themselves out of it again, have always been the 
most popular upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the 
spectators are here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper 
judges in this war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should 
be formed round such "intellectual prize-fighters." Talking is the 
direct object of the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and 
in Shakespeare above all, how obvious it is, that the form of speak- 
ing, whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and 
often a highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into 
possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of 
mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have arrived 
at in that form of composition by any gift short of intuition. We do 
here as we do with novels written in the epistolary form. How 
many improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter- writing, do we put 
up with in Clarissa and other books, for the sake of the delight 
which that form upon the whole gives us. 

But the practice of stage representation reduces everything to a 
controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous 
blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, 
must play the orator. The love-dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, 
those silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night; the more 
intimate and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an 
Othello or a Posthumus with their married wives, all those delica- 
cies which are so delightful in the reading, as when we read of those 
youthful dalliances in Paradise — 

1 As beseem'd 

Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league, 
Alone : 

by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these things 
sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a 
large assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her 
lord, come drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose 
courtship, though nominally addressed to the personated Posthu- 
mus, is manifestly aimed at the spectators, who are to judge of her 
endearments and her returns of love. 

The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days 
of Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the 



224 CHARLES LAMB 

greatest ambition to distinguish themselves. The length of the 
part may be one of their reasons. But for the character itself, we 
find it in a play, and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic 
representation. The play itself abounds in maxims and reflections 
beyond any other, and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle 
for conveying moral instruction. But ijamlet himself — what 
does he suffer meanwhile by being dragged fofth as a public school- 
master, to give lectures to the crowd ! Why, nine parts in ten of 
what Hamlet does, are transactions between himself and his moral 
sense, they are the effusions of his solitary musings, which he retires 
to holes and corners and the most sequestered parts of the palace 
to pour forth; or rather, they are the silent meditations with which 
his bosom is bursting, reduced to words for the sake of the reader, 
who must else remain ignorant of what is passing there. These 
profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring ruminations, 
which the tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, 
how can they be represented by a gesticulating actor, who comes 
and mouths them out before an audience, making four hundred 
people his confidants at once ? I say not that it is the fault of the 
actor so to do ; he must pronounce them ore rotundo, 1 he must ac- 
company them with his eye, he must insinuate them into his audi- 
tory by some trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. He must 
be thinking all the while of his appearance, because he knows that 
all the while the spectators are judging of it. And this is the way 
to represent the shy, negligent, retiring jjajnlet. 

It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity 
of thought and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who other- 
wise would never learn it for themselves by reading, and the intel- 
lectual acquisition gained this way may, for aught I know, be in- 
estimable ; but I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, 
but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted. I 
have heard much of the wonders which Garrick performed in this 
part ; but as I never saw him, I must have leave to doubt whether 
the representation of such a character came within the province of 
his art. Those who tell me of him, speak of his eye, of the magic 
of his eye, and of his commanding voice: physical properties, 
vastly desirable in an actor, and without which he can never insinu- 
ate meaning into an auditory, — but what have they to do with 
Hamlet ? what have they to do with intellect ? In fact, the things 
aimed at in theatrical representation, are to arrest the spectator's eye 

1 [With full voice.] 



TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 225 

upon the form and the gesture, and so to gain a more favourable 
hearing to what is spoken: it is not what the character is, but how 
he looks ; not what he says, but how he speaks it. I see no rea- 
son to think that if the play of Hamlet were written over again by 
some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, 
but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of 
Shakespeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give 
us enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never 
at a loss to furnish ; I see not how the effect could be much differ- 
ent upon an audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to 
represent Shakespeare to us differently from his representation of 

Banks or Lillo. Jja.m}^t would still be a youthful accomplished 

prince, and must be gracefully personated; he might be puzzled 
in his mind, wavering in his conduct, seemingly cruel to Ophelia, 
he might see a ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly when he 
found it to be his father; all this in the poorest and most homely 
language of the serviiest creeper after nature that ever consulted 
the palate of an audience; without troubling Shakespeare for the 
matter : and I see not but there would be room for all the power 
which an actor has, to display itself. All the passions and changes 
of passion might remain ; for those are much less difficult to write 
or act than is thought ; it is a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising 
or falling a note or two in the voice, a whisper with a significant 
foreboding look to announce its approach, and so contagious the 
counterfeit appearance of any emotion is, that let the words be 
what they will, the look and tone shall carry it off and make it pass 
for deep skill in the passions. 

It is common for people to talk of Shakespeare's plays being so 
natural, that everybody can understand him. They are natural 
indeed, they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth 
of them lies out of the reach of most of us. You shall hear the 
same persons say that George Barnwell is very natural, and Othello 
is very natural, that they are both very deep; and to them they 
are the same kind of thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, 
because a good sort of young man is tempted by a naughty woman 
to commit a trifling peccadillo, the murder of an uncle or so, 1 

1 If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the Managers, I would entreat 
and beg of them, in the name of both the Galleries, that this insult upon the morality 
of the common people of London should cease to be eternally repeated in the holi- 
day weeks. Why are the 'Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead 
of an amusement, to be treated over and over a^ain with a nauseous sermon of 
George Barnwell? Why at the end of their vistas are we to place the gallows? 

Q 



226 CHARLES LAMB 

that is all, and so comes to an untimely end, which is so moving; 
and at the other, because a blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills 
his innocent white wife : and the odds are that ninety-nine out of a 
hundred would willingly behold the same catastrophe happen to 
both the heroes, and have thought the rope more due to Othello 
than to Barnwell. For of the texture of Othello's mind, the inward 
construction marvellously laid open with all its strengths and 
weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human misgivings, its 
agonies of hate springing from the depths of love, they see no more 
than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their pennies apiece 
to look through the man's telescope in Leicester Fields, see into 
the inward plot and topography of the moon. Some dim thing or 
other they see, they see an actor personating a passion, of grief, 
or anger, for instance, and they recognize it as a copy of the usual 
external effects of such passions ; or at least as being true to that 
symbol of the emotion which passes current at the theatre for it, 
for it is often no more than that : but of the grounds of the passion, 
its correspondence to a great or heroic nature, which is the only 
worthy object of tragedy, — that common auditors know anything 
of this, or can have any such notions dinned into them by the mere 
strength of an actor's lungs, — that apprehensions foreign to them 
should be thus infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, 
nor understand how it can be possible. 

We talk of Shakespeare's admirable observation of life, when we 
should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and 
everyday characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, 
but from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben 
Jonson's, the very "sphere of humanity," he fetched those images 
of virtue and of knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing 
a part, think we comprehend in our natures the whole; and often- 
times mistake the powers which he positively creates in us, for 
nothing more than indigenous faculties of our own minds, which 
only waited the application of corresponding virtues in him to re- 
turn a full and clear echo of the same. 

To return to Hamlet. — Among the distinguishing features of 
that wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) 

Were I an uncle, I should not much like a nephew of mine to have such an example 
placed before his eyes. It is really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it 
as done upon such slight motives; — it is attributing too much to such charac- 
ters as Millwood; it is putting things into the heads of good young men, which they 
would never otherwise have dreamed of. Uncles that think anything of their lives, 
should fairly petition the Chamberlain against it. 



TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 227 

is that soreness of mind which makes him treat the intrusions of 
Polonius with harshness, and that asperity which he puts on in his 
interviews with Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if 
they be not mixed in the latter case with a profound artifice of love, 
to alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind 
for the breaking off of that loving intercourse, which can no longer 
find a place amidst business so serious as that which he has to do) 
are parts of his character, which to reconcile with our admiration 
of Hamlet, the most patient consideration of his situation is no more 
than necessary; they are what we forgive afterwards, and explain 
by the whole of his character, but at the time they are harsh and 
unpleasant. Yet such is the actor's necessity of giving strong blows 
to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this character, 
who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous 
features, — these temporary deformities in the character. They 
make him express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly de- 
grades his gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable; 
they make him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia's 
father, — contempt in its very grossest and most hateful form ; 
but they get applause by it: it is natural, people say; that is, the 
words are scornful, and the actor expresses scorn, and that they can 
judge of : but why so much scorn, and of that sort, they never think 
of asking. 

So to Ophelia. — All th e Hamle ts that I have ever seen, rant and 
rave at her as if she had committed some great crime, and the audi- 
ence are highly pleased, because the words of the part are satirical, 
and they are enforced by the strongest expression of satirical indig- 
nation of which the face and voice are capable. But then, whether 
Hamlet is likely to have put on such brutal appearances to a lady 
whom he loved so dearly, is never thought on. The truth is, that 
in all such deep affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and 
Ophelia, there is a stock of supererogatory love (if I may venture to 
use the expression), which in any great grief of heart, especially 
where that which preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, 
confers a kind of indulgence upon the grieved party to express 
itself, even to its heart's dearest object, in the language of a tem- 
porary alienation ; but it is not alienation, it is a distraction purely, 
and so it always makes itself to be felt by that object : it is not an- 
ger, but grief assuming the appearance of anger, — love awkwardly 
counterfeiting hate, as sweet countenances when they try to frown : 
but such sternness and fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to show, is 



228 CHARLES LAMB 

no counterfeit, but the real face of absolute aversion, — of irrecon- 
cilable alienation. It may be said he puts on the madman; but 
then he should only so far put on this counterfeit lunacy as his own 
real distraction will give him leave; that is, incompletely, imper- 
fectly; not in that confirmed, practised way, like a master of his 
art, or as Dame Quickly would say, "like one of those harlotry 
players." 

I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which 
Shakespeare's plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to 
differ from that which the audience receive from those of other 
writers; and, they being in themselves essentially so different from 
all others, I must conclude that there is something in the nature of 
acting which levels all distinctions. And in fact, who does not 
speak indifferently of the Gamester and of Macbeth as fine stage 
performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley in the same way 
as the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. S. ? Belvidera, and Calista, and 
Isabella, and Euphrasia, are they less liked than Imogen, or than 
Juliet, or than Desdemona ? Are they not spoken of and remem- 
bered in the same way ? Is not the female performer as great (as 
they call it) in one as in the other ? Did not Garrick shine, and 
was he not ambitious of shining in every drawling tragedy that his 
wretched day produced, — the productions of the Hills and the 
Murphys and the Browns, — and shall he have that honour to 
dwell in our minds forever as an inseparable concomitant with 
Shakespeare ? A kindred mind ! O who can read that affecting 
sonnet of Shakespeare which alludes to his profession as a player: — 

Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide, 

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 

That did not better for my life provide 

Than public means which public manners breeds — 

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand; 

And almost thence my nature is subdued 

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand 

Or that other confession : — 

Alas ! 'tis true, I have gone here and there, 

And made myself a motley to the view, 

Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear — 

Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in our 
sweet Shakespeare, and dream of any congeniality between him 
and one that, by every tradition of him, appears to have been as 
mere a player as ever existed ; to have had his mind tainted with the 



TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 229 

lowest players' vices, — envy and jealousy, and miserable cravings 
after applause; one who in the exercise of his profession was 
jealous even of the women-performers that stood in his way; a 
manager full of managerial tricks and stratagems and finesse: 
that any resemblance shoihi be dreamed of between him and 
Shakespeare, — Shakespeare who, in the plenitude and conscious- 
ness of his own powers, could with that noble modesty, which we 
can neither imitate nor appreciate, express himself thus of his own 
sense of his own defects : — 

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, 
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd; 
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope. 

I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an 
admirer of Shakespeare. A true lover of his excellencies he cer- 
tainly was not; for would any true lover of them have admitted 
into his matchless scenes such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber, 
and the rest of them, that 

With their darkness durst affront his light, 

have foisted into the acting plays of Shakespeare? I believe it 
impossible that he could have had a proper reverence for Shake- 
speare, and have condescended to go through that interpolated scene 
in Richard the Third, in which Richard tries to break his wife's 
heart by telling her he loves another woman, and says, "if she sur- 
vives this she is immortal." Yet I doubt not he delivered this vul- 
gar stuff with as much anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine 
parts : and for acting, it is as well calculated as any. But we have 
seen the part of Richard lately produce great fame to an actor by 
his manner of playing it, and it lets us into the secret of acting, and 
of popular judgments of Shakespeare derived from acting. Not one 
of the spectators who have witnessed Mr. C.'s exertions in that 
part, but has come away with a proper conviction that Richard 
is a very wicked man, and kills little children in their beds, with 
something like the pleasure which the giants and ogres in children's 
books are represented to have taken in that practice; moreover, 
that he is very close and shrewd and devilish cunning, for you could 
see that by his eye. 

But is in fact this the impression we have in reading the Richard 
of Shakespeare ? Do we feel anything like disgust, as we do at 
that butcher-like representation of him that passes for him on the 
stage ? A horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel, 



230 



CHARLES LAMB 



but how is it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect 
which he displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his 
vast knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his part 
— not an atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of 
acting it. Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are 
prominent and staring ; the murderer stands out, but where is the 
lofty genius, the man of vast capacity, — the profound, the witty, 
accomplished Richard? 

The truth is, the Characters of Shakespeare are so much the 
objects of meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their 
actions, that while we are reading any of his great criminal char- 
acters, — Macbeth, Richard, even Iago, — we think not so much 
of the crimes which they commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring 
spirit, the intellectual activity, which prompts them to overleap 
those moral fences. Barnwell is a wretched murderer; there is 
a certain fitness between his neck and the rope ; he is the legitimate 
heir to the gallows; nobody who thinks at all can think of any 
alleviating circumstances in his case to make him a fit object of 
mercy. Or to take an instance from the higher tragedy, what else 
but a mere assassin is Glenalvon ! Do we think of anything but 
of the crime which he commits, and the rack which he deserves? 
That is all which we really think about him. Whereas in corre- 
sponding characters in Shakespeare so little do the actions com- 
paratively affect us, that while the impulses, the inner mind in all 
its perverted greatness, solely seems real and is exclusively attended 
to, the crime is comparatively nothing. But when we see these 
things represented, the acts which they do are comparatively every- 
thing, their impulses nothing. The state of sublime emotion into 
which we are elevated by those images of night and horror which 
Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he enter- 
tains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to murder 
Duncan, — when we no longer read it in a book, when we have 
given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading pos- 
sesses over seeing, and come to see a man in his bodily shape before 
our eyes actually preparing to commit a murder, if the acting be true 
and impressive, as I have witnessed it in Mr. K.'s performance of 
that part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to 
prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing 
semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally 
destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where 
the deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of pres- 



TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 



231 



ence : it rather seems to belong to history, — to something past 
and inevitable, if it has anything to do with time at all. The sub- 
lime images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds 
in the reading. 

So to see Lear acted, — to see an old man tottering about the 
stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters 
in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and dis- 
gusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. 
That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in 
me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The con- 
temptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes 
out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real 
elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might 
more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a 
stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness 
of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the 
explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano : they are storms 
turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea his mind, with 
all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case 
of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even 
as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but cor- 
poral infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we 
read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, — we are in his mind, 
we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daugh- 
ters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a 
mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the 
ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind 
blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses 
of mankind. What have looks, or tones, to do with that sub- 
lime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, 
when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of 
his children, he reminds them that "they themselves are old"? 
What gesture shall we appropriate to this ? What has the voice 
or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all 
art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and stony; 
it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough 
that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate 
has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick 
and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty 
beast about more easily. A happy ending ! — as if the living 
martyrdom that Lear had gone through, — the flaying of his 



232 CHARLES LAMB 

feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life 
the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy 
after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this 
putter and preparation, — why torment us with all this unneces- 
sary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt 
robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his 
misused station, — as if at his years, and with his experience, 
anything was left but to die. 

Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. 
But how many dramatic personages are there in Shakespeare, 
which though more tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) 
than Lear, yet from some circumstance, some adjunct to their 
character, are improper to be shown to our bodily eye. Othello, 
for instance. Nothing can be more soothing, more flattering to 
the nobler parts of our natures, than to read of a young Venetian 
lady of highest extraction, through the force of love and from a 
sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying aside every con- 
sideration of kindred, and country, and colour, and wedding 
with a coal-black Moor — - (for such he is represented, in the im- 
perfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those 
days, compared with our own, or in compliance with popular 
notions, though the Moors are now well enough known to be 
by many shades less unworthy of a white woman's fancy) — it is 
the perfect triumph of virtue over accidents, of the imagination 
over the senses. She sees Othello's colour in his mind. But 
upon the stage, when the imagination is no longer the ruling 
faculty, but we are left to our poor unassisted senses, I appeal to 
every one that has seen Othello played, whether he did not, on 
the contrary, sink Othello's mind in his colour; whether he did 
not find something extremely revolting in the courtship and 
wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether the 
actual sight of the thing did not overweigh all that beautiful 
compromise which we make in reading ; — and the reason it 
should do so is obvious, because there is just so much reality 
presented to our senses as to give a perception of disagreement, 
with not enough of belief in the internal motives, — all that which 
is unseen, — to overpower and reconcile the first and obvious 
prejudices. 1 What we see upon a stage is body and bodily action; 

1 The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does not offend us in 
the reading, it should also not offend us in the seeing is just such a fallacy as sup- 
posing that an Adam and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in the 



TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 233 

what we are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the 
mind, and its movements : and this I think may sufficiently account 
for the very different sort of delight with which the same play 
so often affects us in the reading and the seeing. 

It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters 
in Shakespeare which are within the precincts of nature, have 
yet something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagi- 
nation, to admit of their being made objects to the senses with- 
out suffering a change and a diminution, — that still stronger the 
objection must lie against representing another line of characters, 
which Shakespeare has introduced to give a wildness and a super- 
natural elevation to his scenes, as if to remove them still farther 
from that assimilation to common life in which their excellence 
is vulgarly supposed to consist. When we read the incantations 
of those terrible beings the Witches in Macbeth, though some 
of the ingredients of their hellish composition savour of the gro- 
tesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the most serious and 
appalling that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound 
as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of their 
presence? We might as well laugh under a consciousness of the 
principle of Evil himself being truly and really present with us. 
But attempt to bring these beings on to a stage, and you turn 
them instantly into so many old women, that men and children 
are to laugh at. Contrary to the old saying, that " seeing is 
believing," the sight actually destroys the faith: and the mirth 
in which we indulge at their expense, when we see these creatures 
upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification which we 
make to ourselves for the terror which they put us in when read- 
ing made them an object of belief, — when we surrendered up 
our reason to the poet, as children to their nurses and their elders; 
and we laugh at our fears, as children who thought they saw some- 
thing in the dark, triumph when the bringing in of a candle dis- 
covers the vanity of their fears. For this exposure of super- 
natural agents upon a stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose 
their own delusiveness. It is the solitary taper and the book 
that generates a faith in these terrors: a ghost by chandelier 

poem. But in the poem we for a while have Paradisaical senses given us, which 
vanish when we see a man and his wife without clothes in the picture. The paint- 
ers themselves feel this, as is apparent by the awkward shifts they have recourse to, 
to make them look not quite naked ; by a sort of prophetic anachronism antedating 
the invention of fig-leaves. So in the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's 
eyes; in the seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own. 



234 CHARLES LAMB 

light, and in good company, deceives no spectators, — a ghost 
that can be measured by the eye, and his human dimensions 
made out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, and a 
well-dressed audience, shall arm the most nervous child against 
any apprehensions: as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable 
skin of Achilles with his impenetrable armour over it, "Bully 
Dawson would have fought the devil with such advantages." 

Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile 
mixture which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest: doubtless 
without some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would 
never have sate out to hear so much innocence of love as is con- 
tained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda, But 
is the Tempest of Shakespeare at all a subject for stage repre- 
sentation ? It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and to believe 
the wondrous tale while we are reading it; but to have a con- 
jurer brought before us in his conjuring-gown, with his spirits 
about him, which none but himself and some hundred of favoured 
spectators before the curtain are supposed to see, involves such 
a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all our reverence for the 
author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts 
upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient. 
Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be 
painted, — they can only be believed. But the elaborate and 
anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, 
in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. 
That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much 
to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher 
faculties, positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced 
to aid. A parlour or a drawing-room, — a library opening into 
a garden, — a garden with an alcove in it, — a street, or the 
piazza of Covent Garden, does well enough in a scene; we are 
content to give as much credit to it as it demands ; or rather, we 
think little about it, — it is little more than reading at the top 
of a page, "Scene, a Garden; " we do not imagine ourselves there, 
but we readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. But to 
think by the help of painted trees and caverns, which we know 
to be painted, to transport our minds to Prospero, and his island 
and his lonely cell ; x or by the aid of a riddle dexterously thrown 

1 It will be said these things are done in pictures. But pictures and scenes are 
very different things. Painting is a world of itself, but in scene-painting there is 
the attempt to deceive ; and there is the discordancy, never to be got over, between 
painted scenes and real people. 



TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE 235 

in, in an interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear 
those supernatural noises of which the isle was full : — the Orrery 
Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his musical 
glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his apparatus, to 
make us believe that we do indeed hear the crystal spheres ring 
out that chime, which if it were to inwrap our fancy long, Milton 
thinks, 

Time would run back and fetch the age of gold, 

And speckled vanity 

Would sicken soon and die, 

And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould; 

Yea Hell itself would pass away, 

And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day. 

The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more 
impossible to be shown on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, 
with its no less interesting and innocent first settlers. 

The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the 
Dresses, which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remem- 
ber the last time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at 
the changes of garment which he varied, — the shiftings and 
re-shiftings, like a Romish priest at mass. The luxury of stage- 
improvements, and the importunity of the public eye, require 
this. The coronation robe of the Scottish monarch was fairly 
a counterpart to that which our King wears when he goes to the 
Parliament-house, — just so full and cumbersome, and set out 
with ermine and pearls. And if things must be represented, I see 
not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what robe 
are we conscious of ? Some dim images of royalty — a crown 
and sceptre, may float before our eyes, but who shall describe 
the fashion of it? Do we see in our mind's eye what Webb or 
any other robe-maker could pattern? This is the inevitable 
consequence of imitating everything, to make all things natural. 
Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction. It pre- 
sents to the fancy just so much of external appearances as to make 
us feel that we are among flesh and blood, while by far the greater 
and better part of our imagination is employed upon the thoughts 
and internal machinery of the character. But in acting, scenery, 
dress, the most contemptible things, call upon us to judge of 
their naturalness. 

Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure 
which we take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared 



236 CHARLES LAMB 

with that quiet delight which we find in the reading of it, to the 
different feelings with which a reviewer, and a man that is not a 
reviewer, reads a fine poem. The accursed critical habit, — 
the being called upon to judge and pronounce, must make it 
quite a different thing to the former. In seeing these plays acted, 
we are affected just as judges. When Hamlet compares the 
two pictures of Gertrude's first and second husband, who wants 
to see the pictures ? But in the acting, a miniature must be lugged 
out ; which we know not to be the picture, but only to show how 
finely a miniature may be represented. This showing of every- 
thing, levels all things: it makes tricks, bows, and curtseys, of 
importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than 
by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet- 
scene in Macbeth : it is as much remembered as any of her thrill- 
ing tones or impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this enter 
into the imaginations of the reader of that wild and wonderful 
scene? Does not the mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it 
can? Does it care about the gracefulness of the doing it? But 
by acting, and judging of acting, all these non-essentials are 
raised into an importance, injurious to the main interest of the 
play. 

I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shake- 
speare. It would be no very difficult task to extend the inquiry 
.to his comedies; ?nd to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh 
Evans, and the rest are equally incompatible with stage represen- 
tation. The length to which this Essay has run, will make it, 
I am afraid, sufficiently distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, 
without going any deeper into the subject at present. 



XI 

HENRY JAMES 

(1843) 

THE ART OF FICTION 

[Published in 1884, in Longmans' Magazine. Reprinted in 1888 in Partial 
Portraits.'] 

I should not have affixed so comprehensive a title to these few 
remarks, necessarily wanting in any completeness upon a subject 
the full consideration of which would carry us far, did I not seem 
to discover a pretext for my temerity in the interesting pamphlet 
lately published under this name by Mr. Walter Besant. Mr. 
Besant's lecture at the Royal Institution — the original form of 
his pamphlet — appears to indicate that many persons are inter- 
ested in the art of fiction, and are not indifferent to such remarks, 
as those who practise it may attempt to make about it. I am 
therefore anxious not to lose the benefit of this favourable asso- 
ciation, and to edge in a few words under cover of the attention 
which Mr. Besant is sure to have excited. There is something 
very encouraging in his having put into form certain of his ideas 
on the mystery of story-telling. 

It is a proof of life and curiosity — curiosity on the part of 
the brotherhood of novelists as well as on the part of their readers. 
Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the Eng- 
lish novel was not what the French call discutable. It had no 
air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself 
behind it — of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result 
of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the 
worse for that : it would take much more courage than I possess 
to intimate that the form of the novel as Dickens and Thackeray 
(for instance^ saw it had anv taint of incompleteness. It was, 

237 



238 HENRY JAMES 

however, naif (if I may help myself out with another French 
word) ; and evidently if it be destined to suffer in any way for 
having lost its naivete it has now an idea of making sure of the 
corresponding advantages. During the period I have alluded 
to there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that 
a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only 
business with it could be to swallow it. But within a year or two, 
for some reason or other, there have been signs of returning ani- 
mation — the era of discussion would appear to have been to a 
certain extent opened. Art lives upon discussion, upon experi- 
ment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange 
of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a pre- 
sumption that those times when no one has anything particular 
to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, 
though they may be times of honour, are not times of develop- 
ment — are times, possibly even, a little of dulness. The suc- 
cessful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the 
theory too is interesting; and though there is a great deal of the 
latter without the former I suspect there has never been a genuine 
success that has not had a latent core of conviction. Discussion, 
suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilizing when they 
are frank and sincere. Mr. Besant has set an excellent example 
in saying what he thinks, for his part, about the way in which 
fiction should be written, as well as about the way in which it 
should be published; for his view of the "art," carried on into 
an appendix, covers that too. Other labourers in the same field 
will doubtless take up the argument, they will give it the light 
of their experience, and the effect will surely be to make our interest 
in the novel a little more what it had for some time threatened 
to fail to be — a serious, active, inquiring interest, under protec- 
tion of which this delightful study may, in moments of confidence, 
venture to say a little more what it thinks of itself. 

It must take itself seriously for the public to take it so. The 
old superstition about fiction being "wicked" has doubtless died 
out in England; but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique 
regard directed toward any story which does not more or less 
admit that it is only a joke. Even the most jocular novel feels 
in some degree the weight of the proscription that was formerly 
directed against literary levity: the jocularity does not always 
succeed in passing for orthodoxy. It is still expected, though 
perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which 



THE ART OF FICTION 239 

is after all only a " make-believe " (for what else is a "story?") 
shall be in some degree apologetic — shall renounce the preten- 
sion of attempting really to represent life. This, of course, any 
sensible, wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly perceives 
that the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only an 
attempt to stifle it disguised in the form of generosity. The old 
evangelical hostility to the novel, which was as explicit as it was 
narrow, and which regarded it as little less favourable to our 
immortal part than a stage-play, was in reality far less insulting. 
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt 
to represent life. When it relinquishes this attempt, the same 
attempt that we see on the canvas of the painter, it will have 
arrived at a very strange pass. It is not expected of the picture 
that it will make itself humble in order to be forgiven; and the 
analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist 
is, so far as I am able to see, complete. Their inspiration is the 
same, their process (allowing for the different quality of the 
vehicle), is the same, their success is the same. They may learn 
from each other, they may explain and sustain each other. Their 
cause is the same, and the honour of one is the honour of another. 
The Mahometans think a picture an unholy thing, but it is a 
long time since any Christian did, and it is therefore the more 
odd that in the Christian mind the traces (dissimulated though 
they may be) of a suspicion of the sister art should linger to this 
day. The only effectual way to lay it to rest is to emphasize the 
analogy to which I just alluded — to insist on the fact that as the 
picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general 
description (which does it justice) that we may give of the novel. 
But history also is allowed to represent life ; it is not, any more than 
painting, expected to apologize. The subject-matter of fiction 
is stored up likewise in documents and records, and if it will not 
give itself away, as they say in California, it must speak with 
assurance, with the tone of the historian. Certain accomplished 
novelists have a habit of giving themselves away which must often 
bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously. 
I was lately struck, in reading over many pages of Anthony Trol- 
lope, with his want of discretion in this particular. In a digres- 
sion, a parenthesis or an aside, he concedes to the reader that he 
and this trusting friend are only "making believe." He admits 
that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that he 
can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such 



240 HENRY JAMES 

a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible 
crime ; it is what I mean by the attitude of apology, and it shocks 
me every whit as much in Trollope as it would have shocked me 
in Gibbon or Macaulay. It implies that the novelist is less occu- 
pied in looking for the truth (the truth, of course I mean, that he 
assumes, the premises that we must grant him, whatever they 
may be), than the historian, and in doing so it deprives him at a 
stroke of all his standing-room. To represent and illustrate the 
past, the actions of men, is the task of either writer, and the only 
difference that I can see is, in proportion as he succeeds, to the 
honour of the novelist, consisting as it does in his having more 
difficulty in collecting his evidence, which is so far from being 
purely literary. It seems to me to give him a great character, 
the fact that he has at once so much in common with the philoso- 
pher and the painter ; this double analogy is a magnificent heritage. 
It is of all this evidently that Mr. Besant is full when he insists 
upon the fact that fiction is one of the fine arts, deserving in its turn 
of all the honours and emoluments that have hitherto been reserved 
for the successful profession of music, poetry, painting, architec- 
ture. It is impossible to insist too much on so important a truth, 
and the place that Mr. Besant demands for the work of the novel- 
ist may be represented, a trifle less abstractly, by saying that he 
demands not only that it shall be reputed artistic, but that it shall 
be reputed very artistic indeed. It is excellent that he should have 
struck this note, for his doing so indicates that there was need of it, 
that his proposition may be to many people a novelty. One rubs 
one's eyes at the thought ; but the rest of Mr. Besant's essay con- 
firms the revelation. I suspect in truth that it would be possible 
to confirm it still further, and that one would not be far wrong in 
saying that in addition to the people to whom it has never occurred 
that a novel ought to be artistic, there are a great many others who, 
if this principle were urged upon them, would be filled with an 
indefinable mistrust. They would find it difficult to explain their 
repugnance, but it would operate strongly to put them on their 
guard. "Art," in our Protestant communities, where so marty 
things have got so strangely twisted about, is supposed in certain 
circles to have some vaguely injurious effect upon those who make 
it an important consideration, who let it weigh in the balance. It 
is assumed to be opposed in some mysterious manner to morality, 
to amusement, to instruction. When it is embodied in the work 
of the painter (the sculptor is another affair !) you know what it is : 



THE ART OF FICTION 241 

it stands there before you, in the honesty of pink and green and a 
gilt frame ; you can see the worst of it at a glance, and you can be 
on your guard. But when it is introduced into literature it becomes 
more insidious — there is danger of its hurting you before you know 
it. Literature should be either instructive or amusing, and there 
is in many minds an impression that these artistic preoccupations, 
the search for form, contribute to neither end, interfere indeed with 
both. They are too frivolous to be edifying, and too serious to be 
diverting; and they are moreover priggish and paradoxical and 
superfluous. That, I think, represents the manner in which the 
latent thought of many people who read novels as an exercise in 
skipping would explain itself if it were to become articulate. They 
would argue, of course, that a novel ought to be "good," but they 
would interpret this term in a fashion of their own, which indeed 
would vary considerably from one critic to another. One would 
say that being good means representing virtuous and aspiring char- 
acters, placed in prominent positions; another would say that it 
depends on a "happy ending," on a distribution at the last of prizes, 
pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, 
and cheerful remarks. Another still would say that it means being 
full of incident and movement, so that we shall wish to jump ahead, 
to see who was the mysterious stranger, and if the stolen will was 
ever found, and shall not be distracted from this pleasure by any 
tiresome analysis or "description." But they would all agree that 
the "artistic" idea would spoil some of their fun. One would 
hold it accountable for all the description, another would see it 
revealed in the absence of sympathy. Its hostility to a happy 
ending would be evident, and it might even in some cases render 
any ending at all impossible. The "ending" of a novel is, for 
many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert and 
ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome 
doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes. It is therefore true that 
this conception of Mr. Besant's of the novel as a superior form en- 
counters not only a negative but a positive indifference. It matters 
little that as a work of art it should really be as little or as much of 
its essence to supply happy endings, sympathetic characters, and 
an objective tone, as if it were a work of mechanics : the associa- 
tion of ideas, however incongruous, might easily be too much for it 
if an eloquent voice were not sometimes raised to call attention to 
the fact that it is at once as free and as serious a branch of litera- 
ture as any other. 

R 



242. HENRY JAMES 

Certainly this might sometimes be doubted in presence of the 
enormous number of works of fiction that appeal to the credulity 
of our generation, for it might easily seem that there could be no 
great character in a commodity so quickly and easily produced. 
It must be admitted that good novels are much compromised by 
bad ones, and that the field at large suffers discredit from over- 
crowding. I think, however, that this injury is only superficial, 
and that the superabundance of written fiction proves nothing 
against the principle itself. It has been vulgarized, like all other 
kinds of literature, like everything else to-day, and it has proved 
more than some kinds accessible to vulgarization. But there is as 
much difference as there ever was between a good novel and a bad 
one: the bad is swept with all the daubed canvases and spoiled 
marble into some unvisited limbo, or infinite rubbish-yard beneath 
the back-windows of the world, and the good subsists and emits 
its light and stimulates our desire for perfection. As I shall take 
the liberty of making but a single criticism of Mr. Besant, whose 
tone is so full of the love of his art, I may as well have done with it 
at once. He seems to me to mistake in attempting to say so defi- 
nitely beforehand what sort of an affair the good novel will be. 
To indicate the danger of such an error as that has been the purpose 
of these few pages ; to suggest that certain traditions on the sub- 
ject, applied a priori, have already had much to answer for, and 
that the good health of an art which undertakes so immediately 
to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives 
upon exercise, and the very meaning of exercise is freedom. The 
only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without 
incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. 
That general responsibility rests upon it, but it is the only one I 
can think of. The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this 
result (of interesting us) strike me as innumerable, and such as 
can only suffer from being marked out or fenced in by prescription. 
They are as various as the temperament of man, and they are suc- 
cessful in proportion as they reveal a particular mind, different 
from others. A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a 
direct impression of life : that, to begin with, constitutes its value, 
which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression. 
But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless 
there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a line to be fol- 
lowed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out, is a limitation 
of that freedom and a suppression of the very thing that we are most 



THE ART OF FICTION 243 

curious about. The form, it seems to me, is to be appreciated 
after the fact : then the author's choice has been made, his stand- 
ard has been indicated; then we can follow lines and directions 
and compare tones and resemblances. Then in a word we can en- 
joy one of the most charming of pleasures, we can estimate quality, 
we can apply the test of execution. The execution belongs to the 
author alone ; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure 
him by that. The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment 
and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what 
he may attempt as an executant — no limit to his possible experi- 
ments, efforts, discoveries, successes. Here it is especially that 
he works, step by step, like his brother of the brush, of whom we 
may always say that he has painted his picture in a manner best 
known to himself. His manner is his secret, not necessarily a 
jealous one. He cannot disclose it as a general thing if he would ; 
he would be at a loss to teach it to others. I say this with a due 
recollection of having insisted on the community of method of the 
artist who paints a picture and the artist who writes a novel. The 
painter is able to teach the rudiments of his practice, and it is 
possible, from the study of good work (granted the aptitude), both 
to learn how to paint and to learn how to write. Yet it remains 
true, without injury to the rapprochement, that the literary artist 
would be obliged to say to his pupil much more than the other, 
" Ah, well, you must do it as you can ! " It is a question of degree, 
a matter of delicacy. If there are exact sciences, there are also 
exact arts, and the grammar of painting is so much more definite 
that it makes the difference. 

I ought to add, however, that if Mr. Besant says at the beginning 
of his essay that the "laws of fiction may be laid down and taught 
with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, 
perspective, and proportion," he mitigates* what might appear to 
be an extravagance by applying his remark to " general" laws, and 
by expressing most of these rules in a manner with which it would 
certainly be unaccommodating to disagree. That the novelist 
must write from his experience, that his "characters must be real 
and such as might be met with in actual life;" that "a young 
lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid descrip- 
tions of garrison life," and "a writer whose friends and personal 
experiences belong to the lower middle-class should carefully avoid 
introducing his characters into society;" that one should enter 
one's notes in a common-place book; that one's figures should be 



244 HENRY JAMES 

clear in outline; that making them clear by some trick of speech 
or of carriage is a bad method, and ''describing them at length" 
is a worse one; that English Fiction should have a "conscious 
moral purpose;" that "it is almost impossible to estimate too 
highly the value of careful workmanship — that is, of style;" 
that "the most important point of all is the story," that "the story 
is everything" : these are principles with most of which it is surely 
impossible not to sympathize. That remark about the lower mid- 
dle-class writer and his knowing his place is perhaps rather chilling ; 
but for the rest I should find it difficult to dissent from any one of 
these recommendations. At the same time, I should find it difficult 
positively to assent to them, with the exception, perhaps, of the 
injunction as to entering one's notes in a common-place book. 
They scarcely seem to me to have the quality that Mr. Besant at- 
tributes to the rules of the novelist — the "precision and exactness " 
of "the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion." They 
are suggestive, they are even inspiring, but they are not exact, 
though they are doubtless as much so as the case admits of : which 
is a proof of that liberty of interpretation for which I just contended. 
For the value of these different injunctions — so beautiful and so 
vague — is wholly in the meaning one attaches to them. The 
characters, the situation, which strike one as real will be those that 
touch and interest one most, but the measure of reality is very 
difficult to fix. The reality of Don Quixote or of Mr. Micawber 
is a very delicate shade ; it is a reality so coloured by the author's 
vision that, vivid as it may be, one would hesitate to propose it as 
a model: one would expose one's self to some very embarrassing 
questions on the part of a pupil. It goes without saying that you 
will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality ; 
but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense 
into being. Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad 
forms ; the most one can affirm is that some of the flowers of fic- 
tion have the odour of it, and others have not ; as for telling you in 
advance how your nosegay should be composed, that is another 
affair. It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one 
must write from experience ; to our supposititious aspirant such a 
declaration might savour of mockery. What kind of experience 
is intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is 
never limited, and it is never complete ; it is an immense sensibility, 
a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in 
the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle 



THE ART OF FICTION 245 

in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind ; and when the 
mind is imaginative — much more when it happens to be that of a 
man of genius — it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it con- 
verts the very pulses of the air into revelations. The young lady 
living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is 
lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her 
that she shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater 
miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting, she should 
speak the truth about some of these gentlemen. I remember an 
English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much 
commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of 
her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant 
youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about 
this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar 
opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, 
in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, 
in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were 
seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a pic- 
ture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. 
She had got her direct personal impression, and she turned out her 
type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; she 
also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French, 
so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and pro- 
duced a reality. Above all, however, she was blessed with the 
faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for 
the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of 
residence or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the 
unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge 
the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in gen- 
eral so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any 
particular corner of it — this cluster of gifts may almost be said to 
constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and 
in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of 
impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just 
as (have we not seen it ?) they are the very air we breathe. There- 
fore, if I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience 
and experience only," I should feel that this was rather a tantaliz- 
ing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to 
be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" 

I am far from intending by this to minimize the importance of 
exactness — of truth of detail. One can speak best from one's 



246 HENRY JAMES 

own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality 
(solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of 
a novel — the merit on which all its other merits (including that 
conscious moral purpose of which Mr. Besant speaks) helplessly 
and submissively depend. If it be not there they are all as noth- 
ing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with 
which the author has produced the illusion of life. The cultiva- 
tion of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form, to 
my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist. They 
are his inspiration, his despair, his reward, his torment, his delight. 
It is here in very truth that he competes with life ; it is here that he 
competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the 
look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the 
colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the 
human spectacle. It is in regard to this that Mr. Besant is well 
inspired when he bids him take notes. He cannot possibly take 
too many, he cannot possibly take enough. All life solicits him, 
and to "render" the simplest surface, to produce the most momen- 
tary illusion, is a very complicated business. His case would be 
easier, and the rule would be more exact, if Mr. Besant had been 
able to tell him what notes to take. But this, I fear, he can never 
learn in any manual ; it is the business of his life. He has to take 
a great many in order to select a few, he has to work them up as he 
can, and even the guides and philosophers who might have most 
to say to him must leave him alone when it comes to the applica- 
tion of precepts, as we leave the painter in communion with his 
palette. That his characters "must be clear in outline," as Mr. 
Besant says — he feels that down to his boots ; but how he shall 
make them so is a secret between his good angel and himself. It 
would be absurdly simple if he could be taught that a great deal 
of "description" would make them so, or that on the contrary the 
absence of description and the cultivation of dialogue, or the 
absence of dialogue and the multiplication of "incident," would 
rescue him from his difficulties. Nothing, for instance, is more pos- 
sible than that he be of a turn of mind for which this odd, literal 
opposition of description and dialogue, incident and description, 
has little meaning and light. People often talk of these things as 
if they had a kind of internecine distinctness, instead of melting 
into each other at every breath, and being intimately associated 
parts of one general effort of expression. I cannot imagine com- 
position existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive, in any novel 



kid 



THE ART OF FICTION 247 

worth discussing at all, of a passage of description that is not in 
its intention narrative, a passage of dialogue that is not in its 
intention descriptive, a touch of truth of any sort that does not par- 
take of the nature of incident, or an incident that derives its interest 
from any other source than the general and only source of the suc- 
cess of a work of art — that of being illustrative. A novel is a 
living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in 
proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the 
parts there is something of each of the other parts. The critic 
who over the close texture of a finished work shall pretend to trace 
a geography of items will mark some frontiers as artificial, I fear, 
as any that have been known to history. There is an old-fashioned 
distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident 
which must have cost many a smile to the intending fabulist who 
was keen about his work. It appears to me as little to the point as 
the equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the ro- 
mance — to answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels 
and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures ; but 
that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning,, and I can 
as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can 
imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says 
picture one says of character, when one says novel one says of inci- 
dent, and the terms may be transposed at will. What is character 
but the determination of incident? What is incident but the 
illustration of character ? What is either a picture or a novel that 
is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? 
It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on 
a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an 
incident I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time 
it is an expression of character. If you say you don't see it (char- 
acter in that — allons done /), this is exactly what the artist who has 
reasons of his own for thinking he does see it undertakes to show 
you. When a young man makes up his mind that he has not faith 
enough after all to enter the church as he intended, that is an inci- 
dent, though you may not hurry to the end of the chapter to see 
whether perhaps he doesn't change once more. I do not say that 
these are extraordinary or startling incidents. I do not pretend to 
estimate the degree of interest proceeding from them, for this will 
depend upon the skill Of the painter. It sounds almost puerile to 
say that some incidents are intrinsically much more important than 
others, and I need not take this precaution after having professed 



248 HENRY JAMES 

my sympathy for the major ones in remarking that the only classi- 
fication of the novel that I can understand is into that which has 
life and that which has it not. 

The novel and the romance, the novel of incident and that of 
character — these clumsy separations appear to me to have been 
made by critics and readers for their own convenience, and to help 
them out of some of their occasional queer predicaments, but to 
have little reality or interest for the producer, from whose point 
of view it is of course that we are attempting to consider the art of 
fiction. The case is the same with another shadowy category 
which Mr. Besant apparently is disposed to set up — that of the 
" modern English novel"; unless indeed it be that in this matter 
he has fallen into an accidental confusion of standpoints. It is 
not quite clear whether he intends the remarks in which he alludes 
to it to be didactic or historical. It is as difficult to suppose a per- 
son intending to write a modern English as to suppose him writing 
an ancient English novel: that is a label which begs the question. 
One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one's language and 
of one's time, and calling it modern English will not, alas ! make 
the difficult task any easier. No more, unfortunately, will calling 
this or that work of one's fellow-artist a romance — unless it be, 
of course, simply for the pleasantness of the thing, as for instance 
when Hawthorne gave this heading to his story of Blithedale. 
The French, who have brought the theory of fiction to remarkable 
completeness, have but one name for the novel, and have not at- 
tempted smaller things in it, that I can see, for that. I can think 
of no obligation to which the " romancer " would not be held equally 
with the novelist; the standard of execution is equally high for 
each. Of course it is of execution that we are talking — that 
being the only point of a novel that is open to contention. This is 
perhaps too often lost sight of, only to produce interminable 
confusions and cross-purposes. We must grant the artist his sub- 
ject, his idea, his donnee: our criticism is applied only to what he 
makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it 
or find it interesting: in case we do not, our course is perfectly 
simple — to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea 
even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the 
event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have 
been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal 
weakness is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all, 
we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular 



THE ART OF FICTION 



249 



cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fruc- 
tify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from 
flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting 
experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of com- 
mon things. Gustave Flaubert has written a story about the de- 
votion of a servant-girl to a parrot, and the production, highly fin- 
ished as it is, cannot on the whole be called a success. We are 
perfectly free to find it flat, but I think it might have been in- 
teresting; and I, for my part, am extremely glad he should have 
written it; it is a contribution to our knowledge of what can be 
done — or what cannot. Ivan Turgenieff has written a tale about 
a deaf and dumb serf and a lap-dog, and the thing is touching, lov- 
ing, a little masterpiece. He struck the note of life where Gustave 
Flaubert missed it — he flew in the face of a presumption and 
achieved a victory. 

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion 
of " liking " a work of art or not liking it : the most improved criti- 
cism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate test. I mention 
this to guard myself from the accusation of intimating that the 
idea, the subject, of a novel or a picture, does not matter. It 
matters, to my sense, in the highest degree, and if I might put up 
a prayer it would be that artists should select none but the richest. 
Some, as I have already hastened to admit, are much more re- 
munerative than others, and it would be a world happily arranged 
in which persons intending to treat them should be exempt from 
confusions and mistakes. This fortunate condition will arrive 
only, I fear, on the same day that critics become purged from error. 
Meanwhile, I repeat, we do not judge the artist with fairness unless 
we say to him, "Oh, I grant you your starting-point, because if I 
did not I should seem to prescribe to you, and heaven forbid I should 
take that responsibility. If I pretend to tell you what you must not 
take, you will call upon me to tell you then what you must take; 
in which case I shall be prettily caught. Moreover, it isn't till I 
have accepted your data that I can begin to measure you. I have 
the standard, the pitch ; I have no right to tamper with your flute 
and then criticise your music. Of course I may not care for your 
idea at all ; I may think it silly, or stale, or unclean ; in which case 
I wash my hands of you altogether. I may content myself with be- 
lieving that you will not have succeeded in being interesting, but I 
shall, of course, not attempt to demonstrate it, and you will be 
as indifferent to me as I am to you. I needn't remind you that there 



250 HENRY JAMES 

are all sorts of tastes : who can know it better ? Some people, for 
excellent reasons, don't like to read about carpenters; others, 
for reasons even better, don't like to read about courtesans. Many 
object to Americans. Others (I believe they are mainly editors 
and publishers) won't look at Italians. Some readers don't like 
quiet subjects; others don't like bustling ones. Some enjoy a 
complete illusion, others the consciousness of large concessions. 
They choose their novels accordingly, and if they don't care about 
your idea they won't, a fortiori, care about your treatment." 

So that it comes back very quickly, as I have said, to the liking : 
in spite of M. Zola, who reasons less powerfully than he represents, 
and who will not reconcile himself to this absoluteness of taste, 
thinking that there are certain things that people ought to like, 
and that they can be made to like. I am quite at a loss to imagine 
anything (at any rate in this matter of fiction) that people ought 
to like or to dislike. Selection will be sure to take care of itself, 
for it has a constant motive behind it. That motive is simply ex- 
perience. As people feel life, so they will feel the art that is most 
closely related to it. This closeness of relation is what we should 
never forget in talking of the effort of the novel. Many people 
speak of it as a factitious, artificial form, a product of ingenuity, 
the business of which is to alter and arrange the things that sur- 
round us, to translate them into conventional, traditional moulds. 
This, however, is a view of the matter which carries us but a very 
short way, condemns the art to an eternal repetition of a few fa- 
miliar cliches, 1 cuts short its development, and leads us straight 
up to a dead wall. Catching the very note and trick, the strange 
irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force 
keeps Fiction upon her feet. In proportion as in what she offers 
us we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touch- 
ing the truth ; in proportion as we see it with rearrangement do we 
feel that we are being put off with a substitute, a compromise and 
convention. It is not uncommon to hear an extraordinary assur- 
ance of remark in regard to this matter of rearranging, which is 
often spoken of as if it were the last word of art. Mr. Besant seems 
to me in danger of falling into the great error with his rather un- 
guarded talk about "selection." Art is essentially selection, but 
it is a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive. 
For many people art means rose-coloured window-panes, and selec- 
tion means picking a bouquet for Mrs. Grundy. They will tell 

1 [Stereotype plates ; negatives.] 



THE ART OF FICTION 



251 



you glibly that artistic considerations have nothing to do with the 
disagreeable, with the ugly; they will rattle off shallow common- 
places about the province of art and the limits of art till you are 
moved to some wonder in return as to the province and the limits 
of ignorance. It appears to me that no one can ever have made a 
seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an im- 
mense increase — a kind of revelation — of freedom. One per- 
ceives in that case — by the light of a heavenly ray — that the prov- 
ince of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision. As Mr. 
Besant so justly intimates, it is all experience. That is a sufficient 
answer to those who maintain that it must not touch the sad things 
of life, who stick into its divine unconscious bosom little prohibi- 
tory inscriptions on the end of sticks, such as we see in public gar- 
dens — "It is forbidden to walk on the grass; it is forbidden to 
touch the flowers ; it is not allowed to introduce dogs or to remain 
after dark; it is requested to keep to the right." The young as- 
pirant in the line of fiction whom we continue to imagine will do 
nothing without taste, for in that case his freedom would be of 
little use to him ; but the first advantage of his taste will be to reveal 
to him the absurdity of the little sticks and tickets. If he have 
taste, I must add, of course he will have ingenuity, and my dis- 
respectful reference to that quality just now was not meant to imply 
that it is useless in fiction. But it is only a secondary aid ; the first 
is a capacity for receiving straight impressions. 

Mr. Besant has some remarks on the question of "the story" 
which I shall not attempt to criticise, though they seem to me to con- 
tain a singular ambiguity, because I do not think I understand them. 
I cannot see what is meant by talking as if there were a part of a 
novel which is the story and part of it which for mystical reasons 
is not — unless indeed the distinction be made in a sense in which 
it is difficult to suppose that any one should attempt to convey any- 
thing. "The story," if it represents anything, represents the sub- 
ject, the idea, the donnee of the novel; and there is surely no 
"school" — Mr. Besant speaks of a school — which urges that 
a novel should be all treatment and no subject. There must 
assuredly be something to treat; every school is intimately con- 
scious of that. This sense of the story being the idea, the starting- 
point, of the novel, is the only one that I see in which it can be 
spoken of as something different from its organic whole ; and since 
in proportion as the work is successful the idea permeates and pene- 
trates it, informs and animates it, so that every word and every 



252 HENRY JAMES 

punctuation-point contribute directly to the expression, in that pro- 
portion do we lose our sense of the story being a blade which may 
be drawn more or less out of its sheath. The story and the novel, 
the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never heard 
of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread with- 
out the needle, or the needle without the thread. Mr. Besant is 
not the only critic who may be observed to have spoken as if there 
were certain things in life which constitute stories, and certain 
others which do not. I find the same odd implication in an enter- 
taining article in the Pall Mall Gazette, devoted, as it happens, to 
Mr. Besant's lecture. "The story is the thing ! " says this graceful 
writer, as if with a tone of opposition to some other idea. I should 
think it was, as every painter who, as the time for " sending in" 
his picture looms in the distance, finds himself still in quest of a 
subject — as every belated artist not fixed about his theme will 
heartily agree. There are some subjects which speak to us and 
others which do not, but he would be a clever man who should 
undertake to give a rule — an index expurgatorius — by which 
the story and the no-story should be known apart. It is impossible 
(to me at least) to imagine any such rule which shall not be alto- 
gether arbitrary. The writer in the Pall Mall opposes the delight- 
ful (as I suppose) novel of Mar got la Balafree to certain tales in 
which "Bostonian nymphs" appear to have "rejected English 
dukes for psychological reasons." I am not acquainted with the 
romance just designated, and can scarcely forgive the Pall Mall 
critic for not mentioning the name of the author, but the title 
appears to refer to a lady who may have received a scar in some 
heroic adventure. I am inconsolable at not being acquainted 
with this episode, but am utterly at a loss to see why it is a story 
when the rejection (or acceptance) of a duke is not, and why a 
reason, psychological or other, is not a subject when a cicatrix is. 
They are all particles of the multitudinous life with which the novel 
deals, and surely no dogma which pretends to make it lawful to touch 
the one and unlawful to touch the other will stand for a moment on 
its feet. It is the special picture that must stand or fall, according 
as it seem to possess truth or to lack it. Mr. Besant dees not, 
to my sense, light up the subject by intimating that a story must, 
under penalty of not being a story, consist of "adventures." Why 
of adventures more than of green spectacles ? He mentions a cate- 
gory of impossible things, and among them he places "fiction with- 
out adventure." Why without adventure, more than without 



THE ART OF FICTION 253 

matrimony, or celibacy, or parturition, or cholera, or hydropathy, 
or Jansenism? This seems to me to bring the novel back to the 
hapless little role of being an artificial, ingenious thing — bring it 
down from its large, free character of an immense and exquisite 
correspondence with life. And what is adventure, when it comes 
to that, and by what sign is the listening pupil to recognize it? 
It is an adventure — an immense one — for me to write this 
little article ; and for a Bostonian nymph to reject an English duke 
is an adventure only less stirring, I should say, than for an English 
duke to be rejected by a Bostonian nymph. I see dramas within 
dramas in that, and innumerable points of view. A psychological 
reason is, to my imagination, an object adorably pictorial ; to catch 
the tint of its complexion — I feel as if that idea might inspire one 
to Titianesque efforts. There are few things more exciting to me, 
in short, than a psychological reason, and yet, I protest, the novel 
seems to me the most magnificent form of art. I have just been 
reading, at the same time, the delightful story of Treasure Island, 
by Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson and, in a manner less consecutive, 
the last tale from M. Edmond de Goncourt, which is entitled 
Cherie. One of these works treats of murders, mysteries, islands 
of dreadful renown, hairbreadth escapes, miraculous coincidences 
and buried doubloons. The other treats of a little French girl who 
lived in a fine house in Paris, and died of wounded sensibility be- 
cause no one would marry her. I call Treasure Island delightful, 
because it appears to me to have succeeded wonderfully in what it 
attempts ; and I venture to bestow no epithet upon Cherie, which 
strikes me as having failed deplorably in what it attempts — that 
is in tracing the development of the moral consciousness of a child. 
But one of these productions strikes me as exactly as much of a 
novel as the other, and as having a " story" quite as much. The 
moral consciousness of a child is as much a part of life as the islands 
of the Spanish Main, and the one sort of geography seems to me 
to have those "surprises" of which Mr. Besant speaks quite as 
much as the other. For myself (since it comes back in the last re- 
sort, as I say, to the preference of the individual), the picture of the 
child's experience has the advantage that I can at successive steps 
(an immense luxury, near to the "sensual pleasure" of which Mr. 
Besant's critic in the Pall Mall speaks) say Yes or No, as it may be, 
to what the artist puts before me. I have been a child in fact, but 
I have been on a quest for a buried treasure only in supposition, and 
it is a simple accident that with M. de Goncourt I should have for 



254 HENRY JAMES 

the most part to say No. With George Eliot, when she painted 
that country with a far other intelligence, I always said Yes. 

The most interesting part of Mr. Besant's lecture is unfortunately 
the briefest passage — his very cursory allusion to the "conscious 
moral purpose" of the novel. Here again it is not very clear 
whether he be recording a fact or laying down a principle; it is 
a great pity that in the latter case he should not have developed his 
idea. This branch of the subject is of immense importance, and 
Mr. Besant's few words point to considerations of the widest reach, 
not to be lightly disposed of. He will have treated the art of 
fiction but superficially who is not prepared to go every inch of the 
way that these considerations will carry him. It is for this reason 
that at the beginning of these remarks I was careful to notify the 
reader that my reflections on so large a theme have no pretension 
to be exhaustive. Like Mr. Besant, I have left the question of the 
morality of the novel till the last, and at the last I find I have used 
up my space. It is a question surrounded with difficulties, as wit- 
ness the very first that meets us, in the form of a definite question, 
on the threshold. Vagueness, in such a discussion, is fatal, and 
what is the meaning of your morality and your conscious moral 
purpose? Will you not define your terms and explain how (a 
novel being a picture) a picture can be either moral or immoral ? 
You wish to paint a moral picture or carve a moral statue : will you 
not tell us how you would set about it ? We are discussing the Art 
of Fiction; questions of art are questions (in the widest sense) of 
execution ; questions of morality are quite another affair, and will 
you not let us see how it is that you find it so easy to mix them up ? 
These things are so clear to Mr. Besant that he has deduced from 
them a law which he sees embodied in English Fiction, and which 
is "a truly admirable thing and a great cause for congratulation." 
It is a great cause for congratulation indeed when such thorny prob- 
lems become as smooth as silk. I may add that in so far as Mr. 
Besant perceives that in point of fact English Fiction has addressed 
itself preponderantly to these delicate questions he will appear to 
many people to have made a vain discovery. They will have been 
positively struck, on the contrary, with the moral timidity of the 
usual English novelist ; with his (or with her) aversion to face the 
difficulties with which on every side the treatment of reality 
bristles. He is apt to be extremely shy (whereas the picture that 
Mr. Besant draws is a picture of boldness), and the sign of his 
work, for the most part, is a cautious silence on certain subjects. 



THE ART OF FICTION 255 

In the English novel (by which of course I mean the American as 
well), more than in any other, there is a traditional difference be- 
tween that which people know and that which they agree to admit 
that they know, that which they see and that which they speak of, 
that which they feel to be a part of life and that which they allow 
to enter into literature. There is the great difference, in short, 
between what they talk of in conversation and what they talk of in 
print. The essence of moral energy is to survey the whole field, 
and I should directly reverse Mr. Besant's remark and say not that 
the English novel has a purpose, but that it has a diffidence. To 
what degree a purpose in a work of art is a source of corruption 
I shall not attempt to inquire; the one that seems to me least 
dangerous is the purpose of making a perfect work. As for our 
novel, I may say lastly on this score that as we find it in England 
to-day it strikes me as addressed in a large degree to "young peo- 
ple," and that this in itself constitutes a presumption that it will be 
rather shy. There are certain things which it is generally agreed 
not to discuss, not even to mention, before young people. That is 
very well, but the absence of discussion is not a symptom of the 
moral passion. The purpose of the English novel — "a truly 
admirable thing, and a great cause for congratulation" — strikes 
me therefore as rather negative. 

There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense 
lie very near together ; that is in the light of the very obvious truth 
that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality 
of the mind of the producer. In proportion as that intelligence is 
fine will the novel, the picture, the statue partake of the substance 
of beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to my 
vision, to have purpose enough. No good novel will ever proceed 
from a superficial mind ; that seems to me an axiom which, for the 
artist in fiction, will cover all needful moral ground : if the youthful 
aspirant take it to heart it will illuminate for him many of the mys- 
teries of "purpose." There are many other useful things that 
might be said to him, but I have come to the end of my article, and 
can only touch them as I pass. The critic in the Pall Mall Ga- 
zette, whom I have already quoted, draws attention to the danger, 
in speaking of the art of fiction, of generalizing. The danger that 
he has in mind is rather, I imagine, that of particularizing, for 
there are some comprehensive remarks which, in addition to those 
embodied in Mr. Besant's suggestive lecture, might without fear 
of misleading him be addressed to the ingenuous student. I should 



256 HENRY JAMES 

remind him first of the magnificence of the form that is open to him, 
which offers to sight so few restrictions and such innumerable 
opportunities. The other arts, in comparison, appear confined 
and hampered ; the various conditions under which they are exer- 
cised are so rigid and definite. But the only condition that I can 
think of attaching to the composition of the novel is, as I have al- 
ready said, that it be sincere. This freedom is a splendid privilege, 
and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it. 
"Enjoy it as it deserves," I should say to him; "take possession 
of it, explore it to its utmost extent, publish it, rejoice in it. All 
life belongs to you, and do not listen either to those who would shut 
you up into corners of it and tell you that it is only here and there 
that art inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that this 
heavenly messenger wings her way outside of life altogether, 
breathing a superfine air, and turning away her head from the 
truth of things. There is no impression of life, no manner of seeing 
it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not offer 
a place; you have only to remember that talents so dissimilar as 
those of Alexandre Dumas and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and 
Gustave Flaubert have worked in this field with equal glory. 
Do not think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and 
catch the colour of life itself. In France to-day we see a prodigious 
effort (that of Emile Zola, to whose solid and serious work no ex- 
plorer of the capacity of the novel can allude without respect), we 
see an extraordinary effort vitiated by a spirit of pessimism on a 
narrow basis. M. Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an English 
reader as ignorant; he has an air of working in the dark; if he 
had as much light as energy, his results would be of the highest 
value. As for the aberrations of a shallow optimism, the ground 
(of English fiction especially) is strewn with their brittle particles 
as with broken glass. If you must indulge in conclusions, let them 
have the taste of a wide knowledge. Remember that your first 
duty is to be as complete as possible — to make as perfect a work. 
Be generous and delicate and pursue the prize." 



XII 

EDGAR ALLAN POE 

(1809-1849) 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION 
(1846) 

Charles Dickens, in a note now lying before me, alluding 
to an examination I once made of the mechanism of Barnaby 
Rudge, says — "By the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote 
his Caleb Williams backwards? He first involved his hero in 
a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for 
the first, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what 
had been done." 

I cannot think this the precise mode of procedure on the part 
of Godwin — and indeed what he himself acknowledges is not 
altogether in accordance with Mr. Dickens's idea — but the 
author of Caleb Williams was too good an artist not to perceive 
the advantage derivable from at least a somewhat similar process. 
Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, 
must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted 
with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view 
that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or 
causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all 
points, tend to the development of the intention. 

There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of con- 
structing a story. Either history affords a thesis — or one is 
suggested by an incident of the day — or, at best, the author 
sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form 
merely the basis of his narrative — designing, generally, to fill 
in with description, dialogue, or authorial comment, whatever 
s 257 



258 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

crevices of fact or action may, from page to page, render them- 
selves apparent. 

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keep- 
ing originality always in view — for he is false to himself who 
ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a 
source of interest — I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the 
innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, 
or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on 
the present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel first, and 
secondly, a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought 
by incident or tone — whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar 
tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone 

— afterwards looking about me (or rather within) for such com- 
binations of event or tone as shall best aid me in the construction 
of the effect. 

I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might 
be written by any author who would — that is to say, who could 

— detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his com- 
positions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such 
a paper has never been given to the world I am much at a loss to 
say — but perhaps the authorial vanity has had more to do with 
the omission than any one other cause. Most writers — poets 
in especial — prefer having it understood that they compose 
by a species of fine frenzy — an ecstatic intuition — and would 
positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the 
scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought — at 
the true purposes seized only at the last moment — at the innu- 
merable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full 
view — at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as un- 
manageable — at the cautious selections and rejections — at the 
painful erasures and interpolations — in a word, at the wheels 
and pinions — the tackle for scene-shifting — the step-ladders 
and demon-traps — the cock's feathers, the red paint and the 
black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, 
constitute the properties of the literary histrio. 

I am aware, on the other hand, that the case is by no means 
common in which an author is at all in condition to retrace the 
steps by which his conclusions have been attained. In general, 
suggestions, having arisen pell-mell, are pursued and forgotten 
in a similar manner. 

For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the repugnance 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION 259 

alluded to, nor, at any time, the least difficulty in recalling to 
mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions ; and, since 
the interest of an analysis, or reconstruction, such as I have con- 
sidered a desideratum, is quite independent of any real or fancied 
interest in the thing analyzed, it will not be regarded as a breach 
of decorum on my part to show the modus operandi by which 
some one of my own works was put together. I select The 
Raven as most generally known. It is my design to render it 
manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either 
to accident or intuition — that the work proceeded step by step 
to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a 
mathematical problem. 

Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem, per se, the circum- 
stance — or say the necessity — which, in the first place, gave 
rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once 
the popular and the critical taste. 

We commence, then, with this intention. 

The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary 
work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to 
dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from 
unity of impression — for, if two sittings be required, the affairs 
of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once 
destroyed. But since, ceteris paribus, 1 no poet can afford to 
dispense with anything that may advance his design, it but remains 
to be seen whether there is, in extent, any advantage to counter- 
balance the loss of unity which attends it. Here I say no at once. 
What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief 
ones — that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to 
demonstrate that a poem is such only inasmuch as it intensely 
excites, by elevating the soul; and all intense excitements are, 
through a psychal necessity, brief. For this reason at least one- 
half of the Paradise Lost is essentially prose — a succession of 
poetical excitements interspersed, inevitably, with corresponding 
depressions — the whole being deprived, through the extreme- 
ness of its length, of the vastly important artistic element, totality, 
or unity of effect. 

It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards 
length, to all works of literary art — the limit of a single sitting — 
and that, although in certain classes of pure composition, such as 
Robinson Crusoe (demanding no unity), this limit may be advan- 

1 [Other things being equal.] 



260 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

tageously overpassed, it can never properly be overpassed in a 
poem. Within this limit the extent of a poem may be made to 
bear mathematical relation to its merit — in other words, to the 
excitement or elevation — again, in other words, to the degree of 
the true poetical effect which it is capable of inducing; for it is 
clear that the brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of 
the intended effect — this, with one proviso — that a certain 
degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of 
any effect at all. 

Holding in view these considerations, as well as that degree 
of excitement which I deemed not above the popular, while not 
below the critical taste, I reached at once what I conceived the 
proper length for my intended poem — a length of about one 
hundred lines. It is, in fact, a hundred and eight. 

My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or 
effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, 
throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design 
of rendering the work universally appreciable. I should be carried 
too far out of my immediate topic were I to demonstrate a point 
upon which I have repeatedly insisted, and which, with the poetical, 
stands not in the slightest need of demonstration — the point, 
I mean, that Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. 
A few words, however, in elucidation of my real meaning, which 
some of my friends have evinced a disposition to misrepresent. 
That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, 
and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of 
the beautiful. When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, 
precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect — they refer, 
in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul — not of 
intellect, or of heart — upon which I have commented, and which 
is experienced in consequence of contemplating "the beautiful." 
Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem, merely 
because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made 
to spring from direct causes — that objects should be attained 
through means best adapted for their attainment — no one as 
yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation 
alluded to, is most readily attained in the poem. Now, the object 
Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, 
or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable to a certain 
extent in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, 
in fact, demands a precision, and Passion a homeliness (the truly 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION 26 1 

passionate will comprehend me) which are absolutely antagonistic 
to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable 
elevation, of the soul. It by no means follows from anything 
here said that passion, or even truth, may not be introduced, and 
even profitably introduced, into a poem — for they may serve 
in elucidation, or aid the general effect, as do discords in music, 
by contrast — but the true artist will always contrive, first, to 
tone them into proper subservience to the predominant aim, and, 
secondly, to enveil them, as far as possible, in that Beauty which 
is 'the atmosphere and the essence of the poem. 

Regarding, then, Beauty as my province, my next question 
referred to the tone of its highest manifestation — and all experi- 
ence has shown that this tone is one of sadness. Beauty of what- 
ever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the 
sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of 
all the poetical tones. 

The length, the province, and the tone, being thus determined, 
I betook myself to ordinary induction, with the view of obtaining 
some artistic piquancy which might serve me as a key-note in 
the construction of the poem — some pivot upon which the whole 
structure might turn. In carefully thinking over all the usual 
artistic effects — or more properly points, in the theatrical sense 
— I did not fail to perceive immediately that no one had been 
so universally employed as that of the refrain. The universality 
of its employment sufficed to assure me of its intrinsic value, and 
spared me the necessity of submitting it to analysis. I considered 
it, however, with regard to its susceptibility of improvement, and 
soon saw it to be in a primitive condition. As commonly used, 
the refrain, or burden, not only is limited to lyric verse, but de- 
pends for its impression upon the force of monotone — both in 
sound and thought. The pleasure is deduced solely from the 
sense of identity — of repetition. I resolved to diversify, and 
so heighten the effect, by adhering in general to the monotone of 
sound, while I continually varied that of thought : that is to say, 
I determined to produce continuously novel effects, by the varia- 
tion of the application — of the refrain — the refrain itself remain- 
ing, for the most part, unvaried. 

These points being settled, I next bethought me of the nature 
of my refrain. Since its application was to be repeatedly varied, 
it was clear that the refrain itself must be brief, for there would 
have been an insurmountable difficulty in frequent variations 



262 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

of application in any sentence of length. In proportion to the 
brevity of the sentence would, of course, be the facility of the 
variation. This led me at once to a single word as the best refrain. 

The question now arose as to the character of the word. Having 
made up my mind to a refrain, the division of the poem into 
stanzas was, of course, a corollary, the refrain forming the close 
of each stanza. That such a close, to have force, must be sono- 
rous and susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt, 
and these considerations inevitably led me to the long o as the 
most sonorous vowel in connection with r as the most producible 
consonant. 

The sound of the refrain being thus determined, it became 
necessary to select a word embodying this sound, and at the same 
time in the fullest possible keeping with that melancholy which 
I had predetermined as the tone of the poem. In such a search 
it would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word 
" Nevermore." In fact, it was the very first which presented 
itself. 

The next desideratum was a pretext for the continuous use of 
the one word "nevermore." In observing the difficulty which 
I at once found in inventing a sufficiently plausible reason for its 
continuous repetition, I did not fail to perceive that this difficulty 
arose solely from the preassumption that the word was to be so 
continuously or monotonously spoken by a human being — I did 
not fail to perceive, in short, that the difficulty lay in the recon- 
ciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on the part 
of the creature repeating the word. Here, then, immediately 
arose the idea of a wow-reasoning creature capable of speech, and 
very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but 
was superseded forthwith by a Raven as equally capable of speech, 
and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone. 

I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven, the bird 
of ill-omen, monotonously repeating the one word "Nevermore" 
at the conclusion of each stanza in the poem of melancholy tone, 
and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never losing sight 
of the object — supremeness or perfection at all points, I asked 
myself — "Of all melancholy topics what, according to the uni- 
versal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?" 
Death, was the obvious reply. "And when," I said, "is this 
most melancholy of topics most poetical?" From what I have 
already explained at some length the answer here also is obvious 



mm 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION 263 

— "When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, 
of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic 
in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited 
for such topic are those of a bereaved lover." 

I had now to combine the two ideas of a lover lamenting his 
deceased mistress and a Raven continuously repeating the word 
" Nevermore." I had to combine these, bearing in mind my 
design of varying at every turn the application of the word repeated, 
but the only intelligible mode of such combination is that of imagin- 
ing the Raven employing the word in answer to the queries of the 
lover. And here it was that I saw at once the opportunity afforded 
for the effect on which I had been depending, that is to say, the 
effect of the variation of application. I saw that I could make 
the first query propounded by the lover — the first query to which 
the Raven should reply " Nevermore" — that I could make this 
first query a commonplace one, the second less so, the third still 
less, and so on, until at length the lover, startled from his original 
nonchalance by the melancholy character of the word itself, by 
its frequent repetition, and by a consideration of the ominous 
reputation of the fowl that uttered it, is at length excited to super- 
stition, and wildly propounds queries of a far different character 

— queries whose solution he has passionately at heart — pro- 
pounds them half in superstition and half in that species of despair 
which delights in self-torture — propounds them not altogether 
because he believes in the prophetic or demoniac character of 
the bird (which reason assures him is merely repeating a lesson 
learned by rote), but because he experiences a frenzied pleasure 
in so modelling his questions as to receive from the expected 
"Nevermore" the most delicious because the most intolerable 
of sorrows. Perceiving the opportunity thus afforded me, or, 
more strictly, thus forced upon me in the progress of construction, 
I first established in my mind the climax or concluding query — 
that query to which " Nevermore" should be in the last place an 
answer — that query in reply to which this word "Nevermore" 
should involve the utmost conceivable amount of sorrow and 
despair. 

Here, then, the poem may be said to have had its beginning, 
at the end where all works of art should begin, for it was here at 
this point of my preconsiderations that I first put pen to paper in 
the composition of the stanza : — 



264 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

"Prophet !" said I, "thing of evil ! prophet still if bird or devil ! 
By that Heaven that bends above us — by that God we both adore, 
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, 
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore — 
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore." 
Quoth the Raven — "Nevermore." 

I composed this stanza, at this point, first, that, by establishing 
the climax, I might the better vary and graduate, as regards seri- 
ousness and importance, the preceding queries of the lover, and 
secondly, that I might definitely settle the rhythm, the metre, 
and the length and general arrangement of the stanza, as well as 
graduate the stanzas which were to precede, so that none of them 
might surpass this in rhythmical effect. Had I been able in the 
subsequent composition to construct more vigorous stanzas I 
should without scruple have purposely enfeebled them so as not 
to interfere with the climacteric effect. 

And here I may as well say a few words of the versification. 
My first object (as usual) was originality. The extent to which 
this has been neglected in versification is one of the most unac- 
countable things in the world. Admitting that there is little 
possibility of variety in mere rhythm, it is still clear that the possible 
varieties of metre and stanza are absolutely infinite, and yet, for 
centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think 
of doing, an original thing. The fact is that originality (unless 
in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some 
suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it 
must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the 
highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than 
negation. 

Of course, I pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or 
metre of the Raven. The former is trochaic — the latter is 
octametre acatalectic, alternating with heptametre catalectic 
repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with 
tetrametre catalectic. Less pedantically — the feet employed 
throughout (trochees) consist of a long syllable followed by a short ; 
the first line of the stanza consists of eight of these feet, the second 
of seven and a half (in effect two- thirds), the third of eight, the 
fourth of seven and a half, the fifth the same, the sixth three and 
a half. Now, each of these lines taken individually has been 
employed before, and what originality the Raven has, is in 
their combination into stanza, nothing even remotely approaching 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION 265 

this combination has ever been attempted. The effect of this 
originality of combination is aided by other unusual and some 
altogether novel effects, arising from an extension of the applica- 
tion of the principles of rhyme and alliteration. 

The next point to be considered was the mode of bringing 
together the lover and the Raven — and the first branch of this 
consideration was the locale. For this the most natural suggestion 
might seem to be a forest, or the fields — but it has always ap- 
peared to me that a close circumscription of space is absolutely 
necessary to the effect of insulated incident — it has the force of 
a frame to a picture. It has an indisputable moral power in 
keeping concentrated the attention, and, of course, must not be 
confounded with mere unity of place. 

I determined, then, to place the lover in his chamber — in a 
chamber rendered sacred to him by memories of her who had 
frequented- it. The room is represented as richly furnished — 
this in mere pursuance of the ideas I have already explained on 
the subject of Beauty, as the sole true poetical thesis. 

The locale being thus determined, I had now to introduce the 
bird — and the thought of introducing him through the window 
was inevitable. The idea of making the lover suppose, in the 
first instance, that the flapping of the wings of the bird against 
the shutter is a " tapping" at the door, originated in a wish to 
increase, by prolonging the reader's curiosity, and in a desire to 
admit the incidental effect arising from the lover's throwing open 
the door, finding all dark, and thence adopting the half-fancy 
that it was the spirit of his mistress that knocked. 

I made the night tempestuous, first to account for the Raven's 
seeking admission, and secondly, for the effect of contrast with 
the (physical) serenity within the chamber. 

I made the bird alight on the bust of Pallas, also for the effect 
of contrast between the marble and the plumage — it being under- 
stood that the bust was absolutely suggested by the bird — the 
bust of Pallas being chosen, first, as most in keeping with the 
scholarship of the lover, and, secondly, for the sonorousness of 
the word, Pallas, itself. 

About the middle of the poem, also, I have availed myself of 
the force of contrast, with a view of deepening the ultimate impres- 
sion. For example, an air of the fantastic — approaching as 
nearly to the ludicrous as was admissible — is given to the Raven's 
entrance. He comes in "with many a flirt and flutter." 



266 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

Not the least obeisance made he — not a moment stopped or stayed he, 
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door. 

In the two stanzas which follow, the design is more obviously 
carried out : — 

Then this ebony bird, beguiling my sad fancy into smiling 
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, 
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, 
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore — 
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore?" 
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." 

Much I marvelled this ungainly jowl to hear discourse so plainly, 
Though its answer little meaning — little relevancy bore ; 
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being 
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door — 
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door, 
With such name as "Nevermore." 

The effect of the denouement being thus provided for, I imme- 
diately drop the fantastic for a tone of the most profound serious- 
ness — this tone commencing in the stanza directly following 
the one last quoted, with the line — 

But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only, etc. 

From this epoch the lover no longer jests — no longer sees 
anything even of the fantastic in the Raven's demeanour. He 
speaks of him as a "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous 
bird of yore," and feels the "fiery eyes" burning into his "bosom's 
core." This revolution of thought, or fancy, on the lover's part, 
is intended to induce a similar one on the part of the reader — 
to bring the mind into a proper frame for their denouement — 
which is now brought about as rapidly and as directly as possible. 

With the denouement proper — with the Raven's reply, "Never- 
more," to the lover's final demand if he shall meet his mistress in 
another world — the poem, in its obvious phase, that of a simple 
narrative, may be said to have its completion. So far, everything 
is within the limits of the accountable — of the real. A raven, hav- 
ing learned by rote the single word "Nevermore," and having 
escaped from the custody of its owner, is driven at midnight, through 
the violence of a storm, to seek admission at a window from which 
a light still gleams — the chamber-window of a student, occupied 
half in poring over a volume, half in dreaming of a beloved mis- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OP COMPOSITION 267 

tress deceased. The casement being thrown open at the fluttering 
of the bird's wings, the bird itself perches on the most convenient 
seat out of the immediate reach of the student, who, amused by the 
incident and the oddity of the visitor's demeanour, demands of it, 
in jest and without looking for a reply, its name. The raven ad- 
dressed, answers with its customary word, "Nevermore" — a 
word which finds immediate echo in the melancholy heart of the 
student, who, giving utterance aloud to certain thoughts suggested 
by the occasion, is again startled by the fowl's repetition of "Never- 
more." The student now guesses the state of the case, but is 
impelled, as I have before explained, by the human thirst for self- 
torture, and in part by superstition, to propound such queries to 
the bird as will bring him, the lover, the most of the luxury of 
sorrow, through the anticipated answer "Nevermore." With the 
indulgence, to the extreme, of this self-torture, the narration, in 
what I have termed its first or obvious phase, has a natural termi- 
nation, and so far there has been no overstepping of the limits of 
the real. 

But in subjects so handled, however skilfully, or with however 
vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness or 
nakedness which repels the artistical eye. Two things are in- 
variably required — first, some amount of complexity, or more 
properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestive- 
ness — some undercurrent, however indefinite, of meaning. It 
is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much 
of that richness (to borrow from colloquy a forcible term) which 
we are too fond of confounding with the ideal. It is the excess of 
the suggested meaning — it is the rendering this the upper instead 
of the undercurrent of the theme — which turns into prose (and 
that of the very flattest kind) the so-called poetry of the so-called 
transcendentalists. 

Holding these opinions, I added the two concluding stanzas of 
the poem — their suggestiveness being thus made to pervade all 
the narrative which has preceded them. The undercurrent of 
meaning is rendered first apparent in the lines : — 

"Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door 1" 
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore ! " 

It will be observed that the words, "from out my heart," involve 
the first metaphorical expression in the poem. They, with the 
answer, "Nevermore," dispose the mind to seek a moral in all 



268 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

that has been previously narrated. The reader begins now to 
regard the Raven as emblematical — but it is not until the very 
last line of the very last stanza that the intention of making him 
emblematical of Mournful and never-ending Remembrance is per- 
mitted distinctly to be seen : — 

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, 
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door ; 
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, 
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor ; 
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor 
Shall be lifted — nevermore. 



XIII 

MATTHEW ARNOLD 

(1822-1888) 

THE STUDY OF POETRY 

[Published in 1880 as the General Introduction to The English Poets, 
edited by T. H. Ward. Printed in Essays in Criticism, Second Series.] 

"The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it 
is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find 
an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not 
shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be question- 
able, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. 
Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed 
fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is 
failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything ; the rest is a world 
of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the 
idea ; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day 
is its unconscious poetry." 

Let me be permitted to quote these words of my own, as uttering 
the thought which should, in my opinion, go with us and govern 
us in all our study of poetry. In the present work it is the course 
of one great contributory stream to the world-river of poetry that 
we are invited to follow. We are here invited to trace the stream 
of English poetry. But whether we set ourselves, as here, to fol- 
low only one of the several streams that make the mighty river of 
poetry, or whether we seek to know them all, our governing thought 
should be the same. We should conceive of poetry worthily, and 
more highly than it, has been the custom to conceive of it. We 
should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher 
lestinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it 
hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to 

269 



270 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. 
Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of 
what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced 
by poetry. Science, I say, will appear incomplete without it. For 
finely and truly does Wordsworth call poetry "the impassioned 
expression which is in the countenance of all science " ; and what 
is a countenance without its expression? Again, Wordsworth 
finely and truly calls poetry "the breath and finer spirit of all 
knowledge": our religion, parading evidences such as those on 
which the popular mind relies now ; our philosophy, pluming itself 
on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; 
what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of 
knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at our- 
selves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; 
and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize 
"the breath and finer spirit of knowledge" offered to us by poetry. 
But if we conceive thus highly of the destinies of poetry, we must 
also set our standard for poetry high, since poetry, to be capable of 
fulfilling such high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of ex- 
cellence. We must accustom ourselves to a high standard and to a 
strict judgment. Sainte-Beuve relates that Napoleon one day said, 
when somebody was spoken of in his presence as a charlatan: 
"Charlatan as much as you please; but where is there not charla- 
tanism?" — "Yes," answers Sainte-Beuve, "in politics, in the art 
of governing mankind, that is perhaps true. But in the order of 
thought, in art, the glory, the eternal honour is that charlatanism 
shall find no entrance ; herein lies the inviolableness of that noble 
portion of man's being." It is admirably said, and let us hold 
fast to it. In poetry, which is thought and art in one, it is the glory, 
the eternal honour, that charlatanism shall find no entrance; that 
this noble sphere be kept inviolate and inviolable. Charlatanism 
is for confusing or obliterating the distinctions between excellent 
and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and un- 
true or only half -true. It is charlatanism, conscious or unconscious, 
whenever we confuse or obliterate these. And in poetry, more than 
anywhere else, it is unpermissible to confuse or obliterate them. 
For in poetry the distinction between excellent and inferior, sound 
and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half-true, 
is of paramount importance. It is of paramount importance be- 
cause of the high destinies of poetry. In poetry, as a criticism of 
life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of 



THE STUDY OF POETRY 271 

poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find, we 
have said, as time goes on and as other helps fail, its consolation 
and stay. But the consolation and stay will be of power in pro- 
portion to the power of the criticism of life. And the criticism of 
life will be of power in proportion as the poetry conveying it is ex- 
cellent rather than inferior, sound rather than unsound or half- 
sound, true rather than untrue or half-true. 

The best poetry is what we want ; the best poetry will be found 
to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as noth- 
ing else can. A clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and of 
the strength and joy to be drawn from it, is the most precious 
benefit which we can gather from a poetical collection such as the 
present. And yet in the very nature and conduct of such a collec- 
tion there is inevitably something which tends to obscure in us the 
consciousness of what our benefit should be, and to distract us 
from the pursuit of it. We should therefore steadily set it before 
our minds at the outset, and should compel ourselves to revert con- 
stantly to the thought of it as we proceed. 

Yes ; constantly in reading poetry, a sense for the best, the really 
excellent, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, should 
be present in our minds and should govern our estimate of what 
we read. But this real estimate, the only true one, is liable to be 
superseded, if we are not watchful, by two other kinds of estimate, 
the historic estimate and the personal estimate, both of which are 
fallacious. A poet or a poem may count to us historically, they 
may count to us on grounds personal to ourselves, and they may 
count to us really. They may count to us historically. The 
course of development of a nation's language, thought, and poetry, 
is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poet's work as a 
stage in this course of development we may easily bring ourselves 
to make it of more importance as poetry than in itself it really is, 
we may come to use a language of quite exaggerated praise in 
criticising it ; in short, to overrate it. So arises in our poetic judg- 
ments the fallacy caused by the estimate which we may call his- 
toric. Then, again, a poet or a poem may count to us on grounds 
personal to ourselves. Our personal affinities, likings, and circum- 
stances, have great power to sway our estimate of this or that poet's 
work, and to make us attach more importance to it as poetry than 
in itself it really possesses, because to us it is, or has been, of high 
importance. Here also we overrate the object of our interest, and 
apply to it a language of praise which is quite exaggerated. And 



272 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

thus we get the source of a second fallacy in our poetic judgments 
— the fallacy caused by an estimate which we may call personal. 

Both fallacies are natural. It is evident how naturally the study 
of the history and development of a poetry may incline a man to 
pause over reputations and works once conspicuous but now ob- 
scure, and to quarrel with a careless public for skipping, in obedi- 
ence to mere tradition and habit, from one famous name or work 
in its national poetry to another, ignorant of what it misses, and of 
the reason for keeping what it keeps, and of the whole process of 
growth in its poetry. The French have become diligent students 
of their own early poetry, which they long neglected; the study 
makes many of them dissatisfied with their so-called classical poetry, 
the court-tragedy of the seventeenth century, a poetry which Pellis- 
son long ago reproached with its want of the true poetic stamp, 
with its politesse sterile et rampante, 1 but which nevertheless has 
reigned in France as absolutely as if it had been the perfection of 
classical poetry indeed. The dissatisfaction is natural ; yet a lively 
and accomplished critic, M. Charles d'Hericault, the editor of 
Clement Marot, goes too far when he says that "the cloud of glory 
playing round a classic is a mist as dangerous to the future of a 
literature as it is intolerable for the purposes of history." "It 
hinders," he goes on, "it hinders us from seeing more than one sin- 
gle point, the culminating and exceptional point; the summary, 
fictitious and arbitrary, of a thought and of a work. It substitutes 
a halo for a physiognomy, it puts a statue where there was once a 
man, and hiding from us all trace of the labour, the attempts, the 
weaknesses, the failures, it claims not study but veneration; it 
does not show us how the thing is done, it imposes upon us a model. 
Above all, for the historian this creation of classic personages is 
inadmissible; for it withdraws the poet from his time, from his 
proper life, it breaks historical relationships, it blinds criticism 
by conventional admiration, and renders the investigation of liter- 
ary origins unacceptable. It gives us a human personage no 
longer, but a God seated immovable amidst His perfect work, like 
Jupiter on Olympus ; and hardly will it be possible for the young 
student, to whom such work is exhibited at such a distance from 
him, to believe that it did not issue ready made from that divine 
head." 

All this is brilliantly and tellingly said, but we must plead for a 
distinction. Everything depends on the reality of a poet's classic 
1 [With its unfertile and obtrusive polish.] 



THE STUDY OF POETRY 273 

character. If he is a dubious classic, let us sift him ; if he is a false 
classic, let us explode him. But if he is a real classic, if his 
work belongs to the class of the very best (for this is the true and 
right meaning of the word classic, classical), then the great thing 
for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to 
appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has 
not the same high character. This is what is salutary, this is what 
is formative ; this is the great benefit to be got from the study of 
poetry. Everything which interferes with it, which hinders it, 
is injurious. True, we must read our classic with open eyes, and 
not with eyes blinded with superstition ; we must perceive when his 
work comes short, when it drops out of the class of the very best, 
and we must rate it, in such cases, at its proper value. But the use 
of this negative criticism is not in itself, it is entirely in its enabling 
us to have a clearer sense and a deeper enjoyment of what is truly 
excellent. To trace the labour, the attempts, the weaknesses, the 
failures of a genuine classic, to acquaint one's self with his time 
and his life and his historical relationships, is mere literary dilet- 
tantism unless it has that clear sense and deeper enjoyment for its 
end. It may be said that the more we know about a classic the 
better we shall enjoy him; and, if we lived as long as Methuselah 
and had all of us heads of perfect clearness and wills of perfect 
steadfastness, this might be true in fact as it is plausible in theory. 
But the case here is much the same as the case with the Greek and 
Latin studies of our schoolboys. The elaborate philological ground- 
work which we require them to lay is in theory an admirable prep- 
aration for appreciating the Greek and Latin authors worthily, 
The more thoroughly we lay the groundwork, the better we shall 
be able, it may be said, to enjoy the authors. True, if time were 
not so short, and schoolboys' wits not so soon tired and their power 
of attention exhausted; only, as it is, the elaborate philological 
preparation goes on, but the authors are little known and less 
enjoyed. So with the investigator of "historic origins" in poetry. 
He ought to enjoy the true classic all the better for his investiga- 
tions; he often is distracted from the enjoyment of the best, and 
with the less good he overbusies himself, and is prone to overrate 
it in proportion to the trouble which it has cost him. 

The idea of tracing historic origins and historical relationships 
cannot be absent from a compilation like the present. And natu- 
rally the poets to be exhibited in it will be assigned to those persons 
for exhibition who are known to prize them highly, rather than to 



274 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

those who have no special inclination towards them. Moreover 
the very occupation with an author, and the business of exhibiting 
him, disposes us to affirm and amplify his importance. In the 
present work, therefore, we are sure of frequent temptation to adopt 
the historic estimate, or the personal estimate, and to forget the real 
estimate; which latter, nevertheless, we must employ if we are to 
make poetry yield us its full benefit. So high is that benefit, the 
benefit of clearly feeling and of deeply enjoying the really excellent, 
the truly classic in poetry, that we do well, I say, to set it fixedly 
before our minds as our object in studying poets and poetry, and 
to make the desire of attaining it the one principle to which, as the 
Imitation says, whatever we may read or come to know, we always 
return. Cum multa legeris et cognoveris, ad unum semper oportet 
redire principium. 

The historic estimate is likely in especial to affect our judgment 
and our language when we are dealing with ancient poets ; the per- 
sonal estimate when we are dealing with poets our contemporaries, 
or at any rate modern. The exaggerations due to the historic 
estimate are not in themselves, perhaps, of very much gravity. 
Their report hardly enters the general ear; probably they do not 
always impose even on the literary men who adopt them. But 
they lead to a dangerous abuse of language. So we hear Csedmon, 
amongst our own poets, compared to Milton. I have already 
noticed the enthusiasm of one accomplished French critic for 
" historic origins." Another eminent French critic, M. Vitet, 
comments upon that famous document of the early poetry of his 
nation, the Chanson de Roland. It is indeed a most interesting 
document. The joculator or jongleur Taillefer, who was with 
William the Conquerer's army at Hastings, marched before the 
Norman troops, so said the tradition, singing "of Charlemagne and 
of Roland and of Oliver, and of the vassals who died at Ronce- 
vaux"; and it is suggested that in the Chanson de Roland by one 
Turoldus or Theroulde, a poem preserved in a manuscript of the 
twelfth century in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, we have cer- 
tainly the matter, perhaps even some of the words, of the chant 
which Taillefer sang. The poem has vigour and freshness ; it is 
not without pathos. But M. Vitet is not satisfied with seeing in it 
a document of some poetic value, and of very high historic and lin- 
guistic value; he sees in it a grand and beautiful work, a monu- 
ment of epic genius. In its general design he finds the grandiose 
conception, in its details he finds the constant union of simplicity 



THE STUDY OF POETRY 275 

with greatness, which are the marks, he truly says, of the genuine 
epic, and distinguish it from the artificial epic of literary ages. One 
thinks of Homer ; this is the sort of praise which is given to Homer, 
and justly given. Higher praise there cannot well be, and it is 
the praise due to epic poetry of the highest order only, and to no 
other. Let us try, then, the Chanson de Roland, at its best. Ro- 
land, mortally wounded, lays himself down under a pine-tree, 
with his face turned towards Spain and the enemy — 

" De plusurs choses a remembrer li prist, 
De tantes teres cume libers cunquist, 
De dulce France, des humes de sun lign, 
De Carlemagne sun seignor ki l'nurrit." x 

That is primitive work, I repeat, with an undeniable poetic quality 
of its own. It deserves such praise, and such praise is sufficient 
for it. But now turn to Homer — 

*fis (pdro : roi^s 5* tJ5t] KaT^x ev <pvai£oos aia 
ev AaKe5ai/j.ovL a5#i, cpi\r] ev irarpLdi yair]. 2 

We are here in another world, another order of poetry altogether; 
here is rightly due such supreme praise as that which M. Vitet gives 
to the Chanson de Roland. If our words are to have any meaning, 
if our judgments are to have any solidity, we must not heap that 
supreme praise upon poetry of an order immeasurably inferior. 

Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what 
poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore 
do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and ex- 
pressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone 
to other poetry. Of course we are not to require this other poetry 
to resemble them ; it may be very dissimilar. But if we have any 
tact we shall find them, when we have lodged them well in our 
minds, an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or ab- 
sence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in 
all other poetry which we may place beside them. Short passages, 
even single lines, will serve our turn quite sufficiently. Take the 

1 "Then began he to call many things to remembrance, — all the lands which 
his valour conquered, and pleasant France, and the men of his lineage, and Charle- 
magne his liege lord who nourished him." — Chanson de Roland, III. 939-942. 
2 "So said she; they long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing, 
There, in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaemon." 

Iliad, III. 243, 244 (translated by Dr. Hawtrey). 



276 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

two lines which I have just quoted from Homer, the poet's comment 
on Helen's mention of her brothers ; — or take his 

*A 5ei\u>, tL acpQi 86/j.ev HtjXtj'i &vclkti 
dvqrq.; v/xtis 5' etrrbv dyrjpu) t' adavdrb) re. 
ij Xva 8v<ttt}vol<jl ytier' av8pdcrt.v &\ye exyrov; 1 

the address of Zeus to the horses of Peleus ; — or take finally his 

Kai 0^, ytpov, rb irplv fxtv duovoiiev 5\(3iov eivcu ■ 2 

the words of Achilles to Priam, a suppliant before him. Take that 
incomparable line and a half of Dante, Ugolino's tremendous 
words — 

" Io no piangeva ; si dentro impietrai. 
Piangevan elli . . ." 3 

Take the lovely words of Beatrice to Virgil — 

" Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale, 
Che la vostra miseria non mi tange, 
Ne fiamma d'esto incendio non m'assale . . ." 4 

Take the simple, but perfect, single line — 

"In la sua volontade e nostra pace." 5 

Take of Shakespeare a line or two of Henry the Fourth's expostula- 
tion with sleep — 

" Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast 
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains 
In cradle of the rude imperious surge . . ." 

and take, as well, Hamlet's dying request to Horatio — 

" If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, 
Absent thee from felicity awhile, 
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain 
To tell my story ..." 

1 "Ah, unhappy pair, why gave we you to King Peleus, to a mortal? but ye are 
without old age, and immortal. Was it that with men born to misery ye might 
have sorrow?" — Iliad, XVI. 443-445. 

2 "Nay, and thou too, old man, in former days wast, as we hear, happy." — 
Iliad, XXIV. 543. 

3 "I wailed not, so of stone grew I within; — they wailed." — Inferno, XXXIII. 
39, 4o. 

•* "Of such sort hath God, thanked be His mercy, made me, that your misery 
toucheth me not, neither doth the flame of this fire strike me." — Inferno, II. 91-93. 
6 "In His will is our peace." — Paradiso, III. 85. 






THE STUDY OF POETRY 277 

Take of Milton that Miltonic passage — 

"Darken'd so, yet shone 
Above them all the archangel ; but his face 
Deep scars of thunder had intrench' d, and care 
Sat on his faded cheek . . ." 

add two such lines as — 

" And courage never to submit or yield 
And what is else not to be overcome ..." 

and finish with the exquisite close to the loss of Proserpine, the 
loss 

"... which cost Ceres all that pain 
To seek her through the world." 

These few lines, if we have tact and can use them, are enough even 
of themselves to keep clear and sound our judgments about poetry, 
to save us from fallacious estimates of it, to conduct us to a real 
estimate. 

The specimens I have quoted differ widely from one another, 
but they have in common this : the possession of the very highest 
poetical quality. If we are thoroughly penetrated by their power, 
we shall find that we have acquired a sense enabling us, whatever 
poetry may be laid before us, to feel the degree in which a high 
poetical quality is present or wanting there. Critics give them- 
selves great labour to draw out what in the abstract constitutes the 
characters of a high quality of poetry. It is much better simply to 
have recourse to concrete examples ; — to take specimens of poetry 
of the high, the very highest quality, and to say : The characters 
of a high quality of poetry are what is expressed there. They are 
far better recognized by being felt in the verse of the master, than 
by being perused in the prose of the critic. Nevertheless if we are 
urgently pressed to give some critical account of them, we may 
safely, perhaps, venture on laying down, not indeed how and why 
the characters arise, but where and in what they arise. They are 
in the matter and substance of the poetry, and they are in its man- 
ner and style. Both of these, the substance and matter on the 
one hand, the style and manner on the other, have a mark, an ac- 
cent, of high beauty, worth, and power. But if we are asked to 
define this mark and accent in the abstract, our answer must be : 
No, for we should thereby be darkening the question, not clearing 



278 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

it. The mark and accent are as given by the substance and matter 
of that poetry, by the style and manner of that poetry, and of all 
other poetry which is akin to it in quality. 

Only one thing we may add as to the substance and matter of poe- 
try, guiding ourselves by Aristotle's profound observation that the 
superiority of poetry over history consists in its possessing a higher 
truth and a higher seriousness (cfa\ocrocf)WTepov km cnrovSaioTepov) . 
Let us add, therefore, to what we have said, this : that the substance 
and matter of the best poetry acquire their special character from 
possessing, in an eminent degree, truth and seriousness. We may 
add yet further, what is in itself evident, that to the style and man- 
ner of the best poetry their special character, their accent, is given 
by their diction, and, even yet more, by their movement. And 
though we distinguish between the two characters, the two accents, 
of superiority, yet they are nevertheless vitally connected one with 
the other. The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the 
matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the 
superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner. 
The two superiorities are closely related, and are in steadfast pro- 
portion one to the other. So far as high poetic truth and serious- 
ness are wanting to a poet's matter and substance, so far also, we 
may be sure, will a high poetic stamp of diction and movement be 
wanting to his style and manner. In proportion as this high 
stamp of diction and movement, again, is absent from a poet's 
style and manner, we shall find, also, that high poetic truth and 
seriousness are absent from his substance and matter. 

So stated, these are but dry general ties ; their whole force lies 
in their application. And I could wish every student of poetry to 
make the application of them for himself. Made by himself, the 
application would impress itself upon his mind far more deeply 
than made by me. Neither will my limits allow me to make any 
full application of the generalities above propounded; but in the 
hope of bringing out, at any rate, some significance in them, and of 
establishing an important principle more firmly by their means, 
I will, in the space which remains to me, follow rapidly from the 
commencement the course of our English poetry with them in my 
view. 

Once more I return to the early poetry of France, with which 
our own poetry, in its origins, is indissolubly connected. In the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that seed-time of all modern lan- 
guage and literature, the poetry of France had a clear predominance 






THE STUDY OF POETRY 279 

in Europe. Of the two divisions of that poetry, its productions in 
the langue d ''oil and its productions in the langue d'oc, the poetry 
of the langue d'oc, of southern France, or the troubadours, is of 
importance because of its effect on Italian literature ; — the first 
literature of modern Europe to strike the true and grand note, and 
to bring forth, as in Dante and Petrarch it brought forth, classics. 
But the predominance of French poetry in Europe, during the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is due to its poetry of the langue 
d'oil, the poetry of northern France and of the tongue which is 
now the French language. In the twelfth century the bloom of 
this romance-poetry was earlier and stronger in England, at the 
court of our Anglo-Norman kings, than in France itself. But it 
was a bloom of French poetry; and as our native poetry formed 
itself, it formed itself out of this. The romance-poems which took 
possession of the heart and imagination of Europe in the twelfth 
and thirteenth centuries are French; "they are," as Southey justly 
says, "the pride of French literature, nor have we anything which 
can be placed in competition with them." Themes were supplied 
from all quarters ; but the romance-setting which was common to 
them all, and which gained the ear of Europe, was French. This 
constituted for the French poetry, literature, and language, at the 
height of the Middle Age, an unchallenged predominance. The 
Italian Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, wrote his Treasure 
in French because, he says, "la parleure en est plus delitable et 
plus commune a toutes gens." * In the same century, the thir- 
teenth, the French romance- writer, Christian of Troyes, formulates 
the claims, in chivalry and letters, of France, his native country, 
as follows : — 

" Or vous ert par ce livre apris, 
Que Gresse ot de chevalerie 
Le premier los et de clergie ; 
Puis vint chevalerie a Rome, 
Et de la clergie la some, 
Qui ore est en France venue. 
Diex doinst qu'ele i soit retenue, 
Et que li lius li abelisse 
Tant que de France n'isse 
L'onor qui s'i est arestee !" 

"Now by this book you will learn that first Greece had the re- 
nown for chivalry and letters: then chivalry and the primacy in 

1 [Converse in it is more pleasing to everybody and also more usual.] 



280 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

letters passed to Rome, and now it is come to France. God grant 
it may be kept there; and that the place may please it so well, that 
the honour which has come to make stay in France may never 
depart thence ! " 

Yet it is now all gone, this French romance-poetry, of which the 
weight of substance and the power of style are not unfairly repre- 
sented by this extract from Christian of Troyes. Only by means 
of the historic estimate can we persuade ourselves now to think 
that any of it is of poetical importance. 

But in the fourteenth century there comes an Englishman nour- 
ished on this poetry, taught his trade by this poetry, getting words, 
rhyme, metre from this poetry; for even of that stanza which the 
Italians used, and which Chaucer derived immediately from the 
Italians, the basis and suggestion was probably given in France. 
Chaucer (I have already named him) fascinated his contemporaries, 
but so too did Christian of Troyes and Wolfram of Eschenbach. 
Chaucer's power of fascination, however, is enduring; his poetical 
importance does not need the assistance of the historic estimate; 
it is real. . He is a genuine source of joy and strength, which is 
flowing still for us and will flow always. He will be read, as time 
goes on, far more generally than he is read now. His language is 
a cause of difficulty for us; but so also, and I think in quite as 
great a degree, is the language of Burns. In Chaucer's case, as in 
that of Burns, it is a difficulty to be unhesitatingly accepted and 
overcome. 

If we ask ourselves wherein consists the immense superiority of 
Chaucer's poetry over the romance-poetry — why it is that in pass- 
ing from this to Chaucer we suddenly feel ourselves to be in another 
world, we shall find that his superiority is both in the substance of 
his poetry and in the style of his poetry. His superiority in sub- 
stance is given by his large, free, simple, clear yet kindly view of 
human life, — so unlike the total want, in the romance-poets, 
of all intelligent command of it. Chaucer has not their helpless- 
ness ; he has gained the power to survey the world from a central, 
a truly human point of view. We have only to call to mind the 
Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. The right comment upon it is 
Dryden's: " It is sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that 
here is God's plenty." And again : " He is a perpetual fountain of 
good sense." It is by a large, free, sound representation of things, 
that poetry, this high criticism of life, has truth of substance; and 
Chaucer's poetry has truth of substance. 






THE STUDY OF POETRY 281 

Of his style and manner, if we think first of the romance-poetry 
and then of Chaucer's divine liquidness of diction, his divine flu- 
idity of movement, it is difficult to speak temperately. They are 
irresistible, and justify all the rapture with which his successors 
speak of his "gold dewdrops of speech." Johnson misses the point 
entirely when he finds fault with Dryden for ascribing to Chaucer 
the first refinement of our numbers, and says that Gower also can 
show smooth numbers and easy rhymes. The refinement of our 
numbers means something far more than this. A nation may have 
versifiers with smooth numbers and easy rhymes, and yet may 
have no real poetry at all. Chaucer is the father of our splendid 
English poetry; he is our "well of English undefiled," because 
by the lovely charm of his diction, the lovely charm of his move- 
ment, he makes an epoch and founds a tradition. In Spenser, 
Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, we can follow the tradition of the liquid 
diction, the fluid movement, of Chaucer; at one time it is his liquid 
diction of which in these poets we feel the virtue, and at another 
time it is his fluid movement. And the virtue is irresistible. 

Bounded as is my space, I must yet find room for an example of 
Chaucer's virtue, as I have given examples to show the virtue of the 
great classics. I feel disposed to say that a single line is enough 
to show the charm of Chaucer's verse; that merely one line like 
this — 

"O martyr souded 1 in virginitee !" 

has a virtue of manner and movement such as we shall not find in 
all the verse of romance-poetry ; — but this is saying nothing. The 
virtue is such as we shall not find, perhaps, in all English poetry, 
outside the poets whom I have named as the special inheritors of 
Chaucer's tradition. A single line, however, is too little if we have 
not the strain of Chaucer's verse well in our memory; let us take 
a stanza. It is from The Prioress's Tale, the story of the Chris- 
tian child murdered in a Jewry — 

" My throte is cut unto my nekke-bone 
Saide this child, and as by way of kinde 
I should have deyd, yea, longe time agone ; 
But Jesu Christ, as ye in bookes finde, 
Will that his glory last and be in minde, 
And for the worship of his mother dere 
Yet may I sing O Alma loud and clere." 

J The French soude; soldered, fixed fast. 



282 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

Wordsworth has modernized this Tale, and to feel how delicate and 
evanescent is the charm of verse, we have only to read Words- 
worth's first three lines of this stanza after Chaucer 's — 

" My throat is cut unto the bone, I trow 
Said this young child, and by the law of kind 
I should have died, yea, many hours ago." 

The charm is departed. It is often said that the power of liquid- 
ness and fluidity in Chaucer's verse was dependent upon a free, 
a licentious dealing with language, such as is now impossible ; upon 
a liberty, such as Burns too enjoyed, of making words like neck, 
bird, into a dissyllable by adding to them, and words like cause, 
rhyme, into a dissyllable by sounding the e mute. It is true that 
Chaucer's fluidity is conjoined with this liberty, and is admirably 
served by it ; but we ought not to say that it was dependent upon it. 
It was dependent upon his talent. Other poets with a like liberty 
do not attain to the fluidity of Chaucer; Burns himself does not 
attain to it. Poets, again, who have a talent akin to Chaucer's, 
such as Shakespeare or Keats, have known how to attain to his 
fluidity without the like liberty. 

And yet Chaucer is not one of the great classics. His poetry 
transcends and effaces, easily and without effort, all the romance- 
poetry of Catholic Christendom ; it transcends and effaces all the 
English poetry contemporary with it, it transcends and effaces all 
the English poetry subsequent to it down to the age of Elizabeth. 
Of such avail is poetic truth of substance, in its natural and neces- 
sary union with poetic truth of style. And yet, I say, Chaucer is 
not one of the great classics. He has not their accent. What is 
wanting to him is suggested by the mere mention of the name of the 
first great classic of Christendom, the immortal poet who died 
eighty years before Chaucer, — Dante. The accent of such verse as 

"In la sua volontade e nostra pace . . ." 

is altogether beyond Chaucer's reach ; we praise him, but we feel 
that this accent is out of the question for him. It may be said 
that it was necessarily out of the reach of any poet in the England 
of that stage of growth. Possibly; but we are to adopt a real, not 
a historic, estimate of poetry. However we may account for its 
absence, something is wanting, then, to the poetry of Chaucer, which 
poetry must have before it can be placed in the glorious class of the 
best. And there is no doubt what that something is. It is the 



THE STUDY OF POETRY 283 

o-7rovSaidr?7?, the high and excellent seriousness, which Aristotle 
assigns as one of the grand virtues of poetry. The substance 
of Chaucer's poetry, his view of things and his criticism of life, has 
largeness, freedom, shrewdness, benignity; but it has not this high 
seriousness. Homer's criticism of life has it, Dante's has it, Shake- 
speare's has it. It is this chiefly which gives to our spirits what they 
can rest upon; and with the increasing demands of our modern 
ages upon poetry, this virtue of giving us what we can rest upon will 
be more and more highly esteemed. A voice from the slums of 
Paris, fifty or sixty years after Chaucer, the voice of poor Villon 
out of his life of riot and crime, has at its happy moments (as, for 
instance, in the last stanza of La Belle Heaulmiere x ) more of this 
important poetic virtue of seriousness than all the productions of 
Chaucer. But its apparition in Villon, and in men like Villon, 
is fitful; the greatness of the great poets, the power of their criti- 
cism of life, is that their virtue is sustained. 

To our praise, therefore, of Chaucer as a poet there must be 
this limitation ; he lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, 
and therewith an important part of their virtue. Still, the main 
fact for us to bear in mind about Chaucer is his sterling value 
according to that real estimate which we firmly adopt for all 
poets. He has poetic truth of substance, though he has not high 
poetic seriousness, and corresponding to his truth of substance 
he has an exquisite virtue of style and manner. With him is 
born our real poetry. 

For my present purpose I need not dwell on our Elizabethan 
poetry, or on the continuation and close of this poetry in Milton. 
We all of us profess to be agreed in the estimate of this poetry; 
we all of us recognize it as great poetry, our greatest, and Shake- 

1 The name HeaulimVere is said to be derived from a headdress (helm) worn as 
a mark by courtesans. In Villon's ballad, a poor old creature of this class laments 
her days of youth and beauty. The last stanza of the ballad runs thus : — 

"Ainsi le bon temps regretons 
Entre nous, pauvres vieilles sottes, 
Assises bas, a croppetons, 
Tout en ung tas comme pelottes; 
A petit feu de chenevottes 
Tost allumees, tost estainctes. 
Et jadis fusmes si mignottes ! 
Ainsi en prend a maintz et maintes." 

"Thus amongst ourselves we regret the good time, poor silly old things, low- 
seated on our heels, all in a heap like so many balls; by a little fire of hemp- 
stalks, soon lighted, soon spent. And once we were such darlings ! So fares it 
with many and many a one." 



284 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

speare and Milton as our poetical classics. The real estimate, 
here, has universal currency. With the next age of our poetry 
divergency and difficulty begin. An historic estimate of that 
poetry has established itself; and the question is, whether it will 
be found to coincide with the real estimate. 

The age of Dryden, together with our whole eighteenth cen- 
tury which followed it, sincerely believed itself to have produced 
poetical classics of its own, and even to have made advance, in 
poetry, beyond all its predecessors. Dryden regards as not 
seriously disputable the opinion "that the sweetness of English 
verse was never understood or practised by our fathers." Cowley 
could see nothing at all in Chaucer's poetry. Dryden heartily 
admired it, and, as we have seen, praised its matter admirably; 
but of its exquisite manner and movement all he can find to say 
is that "there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which 
is natural and pleasing, though not perfect." Addison, wishing 
to praise Chaucer's numbers, compares them with Dryden's 
own. And all through the eighteenth century, and down even 
into our own times, the stereotyped phrase of approbation for 
good verse found in our early poetry has been, that it even ap- 
proached the verse of Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Johnson. 

Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics? Is the historic esti- 
mate, which represents them as such, and which has been so 
long established that it cannot easily give way, the real estimate ? 
Wordsworth and Coleridge, as is well known, denied it; but the 
authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge does not weigh much 
with the young generation, and there are many signs to show 
that the eighteenth century and its judgments are coming into 
favour again. Are the favourite poets of the eighteenth century 
classics ? 

It is impossible within my present limits to discuss the question 
fully. And what man of letters would not shrink from seeming 
to dispose dictatorially of the claims of two men who are, at any 
rate, such masters in letters as Dryden and Pope; two men of 
such admirable talent, both of them, and one of them, Dryden, 
a man, on all sides, of such energetic and genial power? And 
yet, if we are to gain the full benefit from poetry, we must have 
the real estimate of it. I cast about for some mode of arriving, 
•in the present case, at such an estimate without offence. And 
perhaps the best way is to begin, as it is easy to begin, with cordial 
praise. 



THE STUDY OF POETRY 285 

When we find Chapman, the Elizabethan translator of Homer, 
expressing himself in his preface thus : "Though truth in her very 
nakedness sits in so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora and 
Ganges few eyes can sound her, I hope yet those few here will so 
discover and confirm that, the date being out of her darkness 
in this morning of our poet, he shall now gird his temples with 
the sun," — we pronounce that such a prose is intolerable. When 
we find Milton writing: "And long it was not after, when I was 
confirmed in this opinion, that he, who would not be frustrate 
of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought him- 
self to be a true poem," — we pronounce that such a prose has 
its own grandeur, but that it is obsolete and inconvenient. But 
when we find Dryden telling us : "What Virgil wrote in the vigour 
of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate 
in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed with 
sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I 
write," — then we exclaim that here at last we have the true 
English prose, a prose such as we would all gladly use if we only 
knew how. Yet Dryden was Milton's contemporary. 

But after the Restoration the time had come when our nation 
felt the imperious need of a fit prose. So, too, the time had like- 
wise come when our nation felt the imperious need of freeing 
itself from the absorbing preoccupation which religion in the 
Puritan age had exercised. It was impossible that this freedom 
should be brought about without some negative excess, without 
some neglect and impairment of the religious life of the soul; and 
the spiritual history of the eighteenth century shows us that the 
freedom was not achieved without them. Still, the freedom was 
achieved ; the preoccupation, an undoubtedly baneful and retard- 
ing one if it had continued, was got rid of. And as with religion 
amongst us at that period, so it was also with letters. A fit prose 
was a necessity; but it was impossible that a fit prose should 
establish itself amongst us without some touch of frost to the 
imaginative life of the soul. The needful qualities for a fit prose 
are regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. The men of letters, 
whose destiny it may be to bring their nation to the attainment 
of a fit prose, must of necessity, whether they work in prose or in 
verse, give a predominating, an almost exclusive attention to the 
qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. But an 
almost exclusive attention to these qualities involves some repres- 
sion and silencing of poetry. 



286 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

We are to regard Dryden as the puissant and glorious founder, 
Pope as the splendid high priest, of our age of prose and reason, 
of our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century. For the 
purposes of their mission and destiny their poetry, like their prose, 
is admirable. Do you ask me whether Dryden's verse, take it 
almost where you will, is not good ? 

" A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged, 
Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged." 

I answer: Admirable for the purposes of the inaugurator of an 
age of prose and reason. Do you ask me whether Pope's verse, 
take it almost where you will, is not good ? 

" To Hounslow Heath I point, and Banstead Down ; 
Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own." 

I answer: Admirable for the purposes of the high priest of an 
age of prose and reason. But do you ask me whether such verse 
proceeds from men with an adequate poetic criticism of life, from 
men whose criticism of life has a high seriousness, or even, with- 
out that high seriousness, has poetic largeness, freedom, insight, 
benignity? Do you ask me whether the application of ideas 
to life in the verse of these men, often a powerful application, no 
doubt, is a powerful poetic application ? Do you ask me whether 
the poetry of these men has either the matter or the inseparable 
manner of such an adequate poetic criticism; whether it has the 
accent of 

"Absent thee from felicity awhile . . ." 



or of 
or of 



"And what is else not to be overcome . . ." 
"O martyr souded in virginitee!" 



I answer: It has not and cannot have them; it is the poetry of 
the builders of an age of prose and reason. Though they may 
write in verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of 
the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our 
poetry, they are classics of our prose. 

Gray is our poetical classic of that literature and age; the 
position of Gray is singular, and demands a word of notice here. 
He has not the volume or the power of poets who, coming in times 






THE STUDY OF POETRY 287 

more favourable, have attained to an independent criticism of 
life. But he lived with great poets, he lived, above all, with the 
Greeks, through perpetually studying and enjoying them; and 
he caught their poetic point of view for regarding life, caught 
their poetic manner. The point of view and the manner are not 
self-sprung in him, he caught them of others ; and he had not the 
free and abundant use of them. But whereas Addison and Pope 
never had the use of them, Gray had the use of them at times. 
He is the scantiest and frailest of classics in our poetry, but he 
is a classic. 

And now, after Gray, we are met, as we draw towards the end 
of the eighteenth century, we are met by the great name of Burns. 
We enter now on times where the personal estimate of poets begins 
to be rife, and where the real estimate of them is not reached 
without difficulty. But in spite of the disturbing pressure of 
personal partiality, of national partiaiity, let us try to reach a 
real estimate of the poetry of Burns. 

By his English poetry Burns in general belongs to the eighteenth 
century, and has little importance for us. 

"Mark ruffian Violence, distain'd with crimes, 
Rousing elate in these degenerate times ; 
View unsuspecting Innocence a prey, 
As guileful Fraud points out the erring way ; 
While subtile Litigation's pliant tongue 
The life-blood equal sucks of Right and Wrong!" 

Evidently this is not the real Burns, or his name and fame would 
have disappeared long ago. Nor is Clarinda's love-poet, Syl- 
vander, the real Burns either. But he tells us himself: "These 
English songs gravel me to death. I have not the command of 
the language that I have of my native tongue. In fact, I think 
that my ideas are more barren in English than in Scotch. I have 
been at Duncan Gray to dress it in English, but all I can do is 
desperately stupid." We English turn naturally, in Burns, to 
the poems in our own language, because we can read them easily; 
but in those poems we have not the real Burns. 

The real Burns is of course in his Scotch poems. Let us boldly 
say that of much of this poetry, a poetry dealing perpetually with 
Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, a Scotch- 
man's estimate is apt to be personal. A Scotchman is used to 
this world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners; 



288 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

he has a tenderness for it; he meets its poet halfway. In this 
tender mood he reads pieces like the Holy Fair or Halloween. 
But this world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners 
is against a poet, not for him, when it is not a partial countryman 
who reads him; for in itself it is not a beautiful world, and no 
one can deny that it is of advantage to a poet to deal with a beauti- 
ful world. Burns's world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and 
Scotch manners, is often a harsh, a sordid, a repulsive world; 
even the world of his Cotter's Saturday Night is not a beautiful 
world. No doubt a poet's criticism of life may have such truth 
and power that it triumphs over its world and delights us. Burns^ 
may triumph over his world, often he does triumph over his world/ 
but let us observe how and where. Burns is the first case we 
have had where the bias of the personal estimate tends to mislead ; 
let us look at him closely, he can bear it. 

Many of his admirers will tell us that we have Burns, convivial, 
genuine, delightful, here — 

" Leeze me on drink ! it gies us mair 
Than either school or college ; 
It kindles wit, it waukens lair, 

It pangs us fou o' knowledge. 
Be't whisky gill or penny wheep 

Or ony stronger potion, 
It never fails, on drinking deep, 
To kittle up our notion 

By night or day." 

There is a great deal of that sort of thing in Burns, and it is un- 
satisfactory, not because it is bacchanalian poetry, but because 
it has not that accent of sincerity which bacchanalian poetry, 
to do it justice, very often has. There is something in it of bra- 
vado, something which makes us feel that we have not the man 
speaking to us with his real voice ; something, therefore, poetically 
unsound. 

With still more confidence will his admirers tell us that we have 
the genuine Burns, the great poet, when his strain asserts the 
independence, equality, dignity, of men, as in the famous song 
For a' that and a' that — 

"A prince can mak' a belted knight, 
A marquis, duke, and a' that ; 
But an honest man's aboon his might, 
Guid faith he mauna fa' that ! 



. THE STUDY OF POETRY 289 

For a' that, and a' that, 

Their dignities, and a' that, 
The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth, 

Are higher rank than a' that." 

Here they find his grand, genuine touches; and still more, when 
this puissant genius, who so often set morality at defiance, falls 
moralizing — 

" The sacred lowe o' weel-placed love 

Luxuriantly indulge it ; 
But never tempt th' illicit rove, 

Tho' naething should divulge it. 
I waive the quantum o' the sin, 

The hazard o' concealing, 
But och ! it hardens a' within, 

And petrifies the feeling." 

or in a higher strain — 

"Who made the heart, 'tis He alone 

Decidedly can try us; 
He knows each chord, its various tone; 

Each spring, its various bias. 
Then at the balance let's be mute, 

We never can adjust it; 
What's done we partly may compute, 

But know not what's resisted." 

Or in a better strain yet, a strain, his admirers will say, unsur- 
passable — 

"To make a happy fire-side clime 
To weans and wife, 
That's the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life." 

There is criticism of life for you, the admirers of Burns will say 
to us ; there is the application of ideas to life ! There is, un- 
doubtedly. The doctrine of the last quoted lines coincides almost 
exactly with what was the aim and end, Xenophon tells us, of all 
the teaching of Socrates. And the application is a powerful one; 
made by a man of vigorous understanding, and (need I say?) a 
master of language. 

But for supreme poetical success more is required than the 
powerful application of ideas to life; it must be an application 
under the conditions fixed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic 
u 



290 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

beauty. Those laws fix as an essential condition, in the poet's 
treatment of such matters as are here in question, high seriousness ; 
— the high seriousness which comes from absolute sincerity. 
The accent of high seriousness, born of absolute sincerity, is 
what gives to such verse as 

"In la sua volontade e nostra pace . . ." 

to such criticism of life as Dante's, its power. Is this accent felt 
in the passages which I have been quoting from Burns ? Surely 
not; surely, if our sense is quick, we must perceive that we have 
not in those passages a voice from the very inmost soul of the 
genuine Burns; he is not speaking to us from these depths, he 
is more or less preaching. And the compensation for admiring 
such passages less, from missing the perfect poetic accent in them, 
will be that we shall admire more the poetry where that accent 
is found. 

No; Burns, like Chaucer, comes short of the high seriousness 
of the great classics, and the virtue of matter and manner which 
goes with that high seriousness is wanting to his work. At mo- 
ments he touches it in a profound and passionate melancholy, 
as in those four immortal lines taken by Byron as a motto for 
The Bride of Abydos, but which have in them a depth of poetic 
quality such as resides in no verse of Byron's own — 

"Had we never loved sae kindly, 
Had we never loved sae blindly, 
Never met, or never parted, 
We had ne'er been broken-hearted." 

But a whole poem of that quality Burns cannot make; the rest, 
in the Farewell to Nancy, is verbiage. 

We arrive best at the real estimate of Burns, I think, by con- 
ceiving his work as having truth of matter and truth of manner, 
but not the accent or the poetic virtue of the highest masters. 
His genuine criticism of life, when the sheer poet in him speaks, 
is ironic ; it is not — 

"Thou Power Supreme, whose mighty scheme 
These woes of mine fulfil, 
Here firm I rest, they must be best 
Because they are Thy will !" 

It is far rather: Whistle owre the lave o'tf Yet we may say of 
him as of Chaucer, that of life and the world, as they come before 



THE STUDY OF POETRY 291 

him, his view is large, free, shrewd, benignant, — truly poetic, 
therefore; and his manner of rendering what he sees is to match. 
But we must note, at the same time, his great difference from 
Chaucer. The freedom of Chaucer is heightened, in Burns, 
by a fiery, reckless energy; the benignity of Chaucer deepens, 
in Burns, into an overwhelming sense of the pathos of things ; — 
of the pathos of human nature, the pathos, also, of non-human 
nature. Instead of the fluidity of Chaucer's manner, the manner 
of Burns has spring, bounding swiftness. Burns is by far the 
greater force, though he has perhaps less charm. The world of 
Chaucer is fairer, richer, more significant than that of Burns; 
but when the largeness and freedom of Burns get full sweep, as 
in Tarn 0' Shanter, or still more in that puissant and splendid 
production, The Jolly Beggars, his world may be what it will, 
his poetic genius triumphs over it. In the world of The Jolly 
Beggars there is more than hideousness and squalor, there is 
bestiality; yet the piece is a superb poetic success. It has a 
breadth, truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auer- 
bach's Cellar, of Goethe's Faust, seem artificial and tame be- 
side it, and which are only matched by Shakespeare and Aris- 
tophanes. 

Here, where his largeness and freedom serve him so admirably, 
and also in those poems and songs where to shrewdness he adds 
infinite archness and wit, and to benignity infinite pathos, where 
his manner is flawless, and a perfect poetic whole is the result, — 
in things like the address to the mouse whose home he had ruined, 
in things like Duncan Gray, Tam Glen, Whistle and I'll come to 
you my Lad, Auld Lang Syne (this list might be made much 
longer), — here we have the genuine Burns, of whom the real 
estimate must be high indeed. Not a classic, nor with the excel- 
lent cnrovhaiorr)*; of the great classics, nor with a verse rising to a 
criticism of life and a virtue like theirs ; but a poet with thorough 
truth of substance and an answering truth of style, giving us a 
poetry sound to the core. We all of us have a leaning towards 
the pathetic, and may be inclined perhaps to prize Burns most 
for his touches of piercing, sometimes almost intolerable, pathos; 
for verse like — ■ 

"We twa hae paidl't i' the burn 
From mornin' sun till dine ; 
But seas between us braid hae roar'd 
Sin auld lang syne ..." 



292 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

where he is as lovely as he is sound. But perhaps it is by the 
perfection of soundness of his lighter and archer masterpieces 
that he is poetically most wholesome for us. For the votary 
misled by a personal estimate of Shelley, as so many of us have 
been, are, and will be, — of that beautiful spirit building his 
many-coloured haze of words and images 

" Pinnacled dim in the intense inane " — 

no contact can be wholesomer than the contact with Burns at 
his archest and soundest. Side by side with the 

" On the brink of the night and the morning 
My coursers are wont to respire, 
But the Earth has just whispered a warning 

That their flight must be swifter than fire ..." 

of Prometheus Unbound, how salutary, how very salutary, to place 
this from Tarn Glen — 

" My minnie does constantly deave me 
And bids me beware o' young men; 
They flatter, she says, to deceive me ; 
But wha can think sae o' Tarn Glen?" 

But we enter on burning ground as we approach the poetry of 
times so near to us — poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and 
Wordsworth — of which the estimates are so often not only per- 
sonal, but personal with passion. For my purpose, it is enough 
to haye taken the single case of Burns, the first poet we come to of 
whose work the estimate formed is evidently apt to be personal, 
and to have suggested how we may proceed, using the poetry of 
the great classics as a sort of touchstone, to correct this estimate, 
as we had previously corrected by the same means the historic 
estimate where we met with it. A collection like the present, with 
its succession of celebrated names and celebrated poems, offers 
a good opportunity to us for resolutely endeavouring to make our 
estimates of poetry real. I have sought to point out a method 
which will help us in making them so, and to exhibit it in use so 
far as to put any one who likes in a way of applying it for himself. 

At any rate the end to which the method and the estimate are 
designed to lead, and from leading to which, if they do lead to it, 
they get their whole value, — the benefit of being able clearly 
to feel and deeply to enjoy the best, the truly classic, in poetry, — 
is an end, let me say it once more at parting, of supreme impor- 



THE STUDY OF POETRY 293 

tance. We are often told that an era is opening in which we are 
to see multitudes of a common sort of readers, and masses of a 
common sort of literature; that such readers do not want and 
could not relish anything better than such literature, and that to 
provide it is becoming a vast and profitable industry. Even if 
good literature entirely lost currency with the world, it would 
still be abundantly worth while to continue to enjoy it by oneself. 
But it never will lose currency with the world, in spite of momen- 
tary appearances; it never will lose supremacy. Currency and 
supremacy are insured to it, not indeed by the world's deliberate 
and conscious choice, but by something far deeper, — by the 
instinct of self-preservation in humanity. 



XIV 

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

(1772-1834) 

ON POETRY AND POETIC POWER 
[Chapters XIV. and XV. of Biographia Literaria, 181 7.] 

During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neigh- 
bours, our conversation turned frequently on the two cardinal points 
of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a 
faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving 
the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. 
The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which 
moonlight or sunset, diffused over a known and familiar landscape, 
appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These 
are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which 
of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed 
of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, 
in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was 
to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth 
of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, 
supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to 
every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has 
at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the 
second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the 
characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every 
village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind 
to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. 

In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which 
it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons 
and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to 
transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance 
of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that 

294 



ON POETRY AND POETIC POWER 295 

willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes 
poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose 
to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of 
every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, 
by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, 
and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before 
us ; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the 
film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, 
ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. 

With this view I wrote the Ancient Mariner, and was preparing, 
among other poems, the Dark Ladie, and the Chris tab el, in which 
I should have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my 
first attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so 
much more successful, and the number of his poems so much 
greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, ap- 
peared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. 
Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own char- 
acter, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction which is 
characteristic of his genius. In this form the Lyrical Ballads 
were published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, 
whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual orna- 
ments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be 
so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleas- 
urable interest which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. 
To the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; 
in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary 
import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this 
style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible 
all phrases and forms of style that were not included in what he 
(unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called 
the language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in 
which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, 
however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole 
long-continued controversy. For from the conjunction of perceived 
power with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy, and in some 
instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the 
controversy has been conducted by the assailants. 

Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things 
which they were for a long time described as being ; had they been 
really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely 
by meanness of language and inanity of thought ; had they indeed 



296 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pre- 
tended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead 
weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface 
along with them. But year after year increased the number of 
Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were found, too, not in the 
lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of 
strong sensibility and meditative minds ; and their admiration (in- 
flamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished 
by its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervour. These 
facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or 
less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously 
denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of 
alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which 
would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence with which 
it whirled them round and round. With many parts of this pref- 
ace, in the sense attributed to them, and which the words un- 
doubtedly seem to authorize, I never concurred; but,, on the 
contrary, objected to them as erroneous in principle, and as con- 
tradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same 
preface and to the author's own practice in the greater number 
of the poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth, in his recent collec- 
tion, has, I find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of 
his second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice. But 
he has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his 
poetic creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a con- 
troversy, in which I have been honoured more than I deserve by 
the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient 
to declare, once for all, in what points I coincide with his opinions, 
and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render my- 
self intelligible, I must previously, in as few words as possible, ex- 
plain my ideas, first, of a poem ; and secondly, of poetry itself, in 
kind and in essence. 

The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinc- 
tion ; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself 
constantly aware that distinction is not division. In order to ob- 
tain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate 
its distinguishable parts ; and this is the technical process of philoso- 
phy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our con- 
ceptions to the unity in which they actually coexist ; and this is 
the result of philosophy. 

A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; 



ON POETRY AND POETIC POWER 297 

the difference, therefore, must consist in a different combination of 
them, in consequence of a different object proposed. According 
to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combina- 
tion. It is possible that the object may be merely to facilitate the 
recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial arrange- 
ment; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is 
distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both con- 
jointly. In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name 
of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days in the several 
months — 

Thirty days hath September, 

April, June, and November, etc. 

and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular 
pleasure is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and 
quantities, all compositions that have this charm superadded, 
whatever be their contents, may be entitled poems. 

So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and 
contents supplies an additional ground of distinction. The imme- 
diate purpose may be the communication of truths ; either of truth 
absolute and demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts 
experienced and recorded, as in history. Pleasure, and that of the 
highest and most permanent kind, may result from the attainment 
of the end ; but it is not itself the immediate end. In other works 
the communication of pleasure may be the immediate purpose; 
and though truth, either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ulti- 
mate end, yet this will distinguish the character of the author, not 
the class to which the work belongs. Blest indeed is that state of 
society, in which the immediate purpose would be baffled by the 
perversion of the proper ultimate end ; in which no charm of diction 
or imagery could exempt the Bathyllus even of an Anacreon, or 
the Alexis of Virgil, from disgust and aversion ! 

But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate ob- 
ject of a work not metrically composed; and that object may have 
been in a high degree attained, as in novels and romances. Would 
then the mere superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, 
entitle these to the name of poems ? The answer is, that nothing 
can permanently please which does not contain in itself the reason 
why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be superadded, all other 
parts must be made consonant with it. They must be such as to 
justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an 



298 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated 
to excite. The final definition then, so deduced, may be thus 
worded. A poem is that species of composition which is opposed 
to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, 
not truth; and from all other species (having this object in com- 
mon with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight 
from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from 
each component part. 

Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the dispu- 
tants attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and 
in few instances has this been more striking than in disputes con- 
cerning the present subject. If a man chooses to call every com- 
position a poem which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave 
his opinion uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent 
to characterize the writer's intention. If it were subjoined that 
the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a 
series of interesting reflections, I of course admit this as another fit 
ingredient of a poem, and an additional merit. But if the defini- 
tion sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I answer, it must be 
one the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; 
all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the pur- 
pose and known influences of metrical arrangement. The philo- 
sophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all 
countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one 
hand to a series of striking lines or distichs, each of which, absorb- 
ing the whole attention of the reader to itself, disjoins it from its 
context, and makes it a separate whole, instead of a harmonizing 
part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from 
which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by 
the component parts. The reader should be carried forward, not 
merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a 
restless desire to arrive at the final solution ; but by the pleasurable 
activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. 
Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the em- 
blem of intellectual power ; or like the path of sound through the 
air, at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retro- 
gressive movement collects the force which again carries him on- 
ward. Prcecipitandus est liber spiritus, 1 says Petronius Arbiter 
most happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb, 

1 [The unrestrained spirit must go headlong.] 



ON POETRY AND POETIC POWER 299 

and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer 
words. 

But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a 
poem, we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings 
of Plato and Bishop Taylor, and the Theoria Sacra of Burnet, fur- 
nish undeniable proofs that poetry *)f the highest kind may exist 
without metre, and even without the contradistinguishing objects 
of a poem. The first chapter of Isaiah (indeed a very large propor- 
tion of the whole book) is poetry in the most emphatic sense ; yet 
it would be not less irrational than strange to assert that pleasure, 
and not truth, was the immediate object of the prophet. In short, 
whatever specific import we attach to the word poetry, there will 
be found involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of 
any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry. Yet if a 
harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining parts must be 
preserved in keeping with the poetry ; and this can be no otherwise 
effected than by such a studied selection and artificial arrangement 
as will partake of one, though not a peculiar, property of poetry. 
And this again can be no other than the property of exciting a more 
continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at, 
whether colloquial or written. 

My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use 
of the word, have been in part anticipated in the preceding disqui- 
sition on the fancy and imagination. What is poetry ? is so nearly 
the same question with, what is a poet ? that the answer to the one 
is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction re- 
sulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies 
the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind. The 
poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man 
into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, 
according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone 
and spirit of unity that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, 
by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively 
appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put in 
action by the will and understanding, and retained under their 
irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (laxis effertur 
habenis), 1 reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite 
or discordant qualities : of sameness, with difference; of the gen- 
eral, with the concrete ; the idea, with the image; the individual, 

1 [He holds the reins lightly.] 



300 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with 
old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with 
more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self- 
possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; 
and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, 
still subordinates art to nature, the manner to the matter, and our 
admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry, Doubt- 
less, as Sir John Davies observes of the soul (and his words may 
with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately, 
to the poetic imagination) — 

Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns 
Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, 
As fire converts to tire the things it burns, 
As we our food into our nature change. 

From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, 
And draws a kind of quintessence from things; 
Which to her proper nature she transforms 
To bear them light on her celestial wings. 

Thus does she, when from individual states 
She doth abstract the universal kinds; 
Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates 
Steal access through our senses to our minds. 

Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its dra- 
pery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere, 
and in each ; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole. 

In the application of these principles to purposes of practical 
criticism as employed in the appraisal of works more or less im- 
perfect, I have endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a 
poem are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms 
of poetic power, as distinguished from general talent determined 
to poetic composition by accidental motives, by an act of the will, 
rather than by the inspiration of a genial and productive nature. 
In this investigation, I could not, I thought, do better than keep 
before me the earliest work of the greatest genius that perhaps hu- 
man nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded Shakespeare. 
I mean the Venus and Adonis, and the Lucrece; works which give 
at once strong promises of the strength, and yet obvious proofs of 
the immaturity, of his genius. From these I abstracted the follow- 
ing marks, as characteristics of original poetic genius in general. 



ON POETRY AND POETIC POWER 30I 

1. In the Venus and Adonis the first and obvious excellence is 
the perfect sweetness of the versification, its adaptation to the sub- 
ject, and the power displayed in varying the march of the words 
without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was 
demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of pre- 
serving a sense of melody predominant. The delight in richness 
and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently 
original, and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, I re- 
gard as a highly favourable promise in the compositions of a young 
man. "The man that hath not music in his soul" can indeed 
never be a genuine poet. Imagery (even taken from nature, much 
more when transplanted from books, as travels, voyages, and works 
of natural history), affecting incidents, just thoughts, interesting 
personal or domestic feelings, and with these the art of their 
combination or intertexture in the form of a poem, may all by 
incessant effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talents and much 
reading, who, as I once before observed, has mistaken an intense 
desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius ; the love of 
the arbitrary end for a possession of the peculiar means. But the 
sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift 
of imagination ; and this, together with the power of reducing mul- 
titude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by 
some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and 
improved, but can never be learnt. It is in these that Poeta nasci- 
tur nonfit. 1 

2. A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very re- 
mote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer him- 
self. At least I have found that where the subject is taken imme- 
diately from the author's personal sensations and experiences, the 
excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and 
often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power. We may per- 
haps remember the tale of the statuary, who had acquired consider- 
able reputation for the legs of his goddesses, though the rest of the 
statue accorded but indifferently with ideal beauty; till his wife, 
elated by her husband's praises, modestly acknowledged that she 
herself had been his constant model. In the Venus and Adonis 
this proof of poetic power exists even to excess. It is throughout 
as if a superior spirit, more intuitive, more intimately conscious 
even than the characters themselves, not only of every outward 
look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest 

1 [The poet is born, not made.] 



302 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view; 
himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated 
only by that pleasurable excitement which had resulted from the 
energetic fervour of his own spirit, in so vividly exhibiting what it 
had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I think I should 
have conjectured from these poems that even then the great in- 
stinct which impelled the poet to the drama was secretly working 
in him, prompting him by a series and never-broken chain of im- 
agery, always vivid, and because unbroken, often minute; by the 
highest effort of the picturesque in words, of which words are 
capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, 
even Dante not excepted; to provide a substitute for that visual 
language, that constant intervention and running comment by 
tone, look, and gesture, which, in his dramatic works, he was 
entitled to expect from the players. His Venus and Adonis seem 
at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of 
those characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be 
told nothing, but to see and hear everything. Hence it is that from 
the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader ; 
from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of 
the thoughts and images ; and, above all, from the alienation, and, 
if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's 
own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and the 
analyst; that, though the very subject cannot but detract from the 
pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on 
a moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more 
offensively, Wieland has done; instead of degrading and deform- 
ing passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of con- 
cupiscence, Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse 
itself so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the read- 
er's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful, 
now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery; 
or by diverting our attention from the main subject by those fre- 
quent witty or profound reflections which the poet's ever active 
mind has deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the 
incidents. The reader is forced into too much action to sym- 
pathize with the merely passive of our nature. As little can a mind 
thus roused and awakened be brooded on by mean and instinct 
emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep upon the surface of a lake 
while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and billows. 
3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, 



ON POETRY AND POETIC POWER 303 

though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented 
in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They be- 
come proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a 
predominant passion ; or by associated thoughts or images awak- 
ened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing 
multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or, lastly, when a 
human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's 
own spirit, 

Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air. 

In the two following lines, for instance, there is nothing objec- 
tionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their 
proper place, part of a descriptive poem : — 

Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd 
Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve. 

But with the small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be 
equally in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive 
tour. The same image will rise into a semblance of poetry if thus 
conveyed : — 

Yon row of bleak and visionary pines, 
By twilight-glimpse discerned, mark ! how they flee 
From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild 
Streaming before them. 

I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, 
of that particular excellence which I had in view, and in which 
Shakespeare, even in his earliest as in his latest works, surpasses 
all other poets. It is by this that he still gives a dignity and a pas- 
sion to the objects which he presents. Unaided by any previous 
excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power. 

Full many a glorious morning have I seen 

Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye. — Sonnet 33. 

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul 
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, 
Can yet the lease of my true love control, 
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom. 
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured, 
And the sad augurs mock their own presage : 
Incertainties now crown themselves assured, 
And peace proclaims olives of endless age. 



304 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

Now with the drops of this most balmy time 
My love looks fresh: and Death to me subscribes, 
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, 
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes. 
And thou in this shalt find thy monument, 
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent. 

— Sonnet 107. 

As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic 
genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colours itself 
to the circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost 
in the mind. For unrivalled instances of this excellence the reader's 
own memory will refer him to the Lear, Othello, in short, to which 
not of the" great, ever living, dead man' } s" dramatic works? Inopetn 
me copia fecit. 1 How true it is to nature, he has himself finely 
expressed in the instance of love in Sonnet 98 : — 

From you have I been absent in the spring, 
When proud-pied April drest in all his trim 
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing, 
That heavy Saturn laugh' d and leap'd with him. 

Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell 
Of different flowers in odour and in hue, 
Could make me any summer's story tell, 
• Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew ; 
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white, 
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose ; 
They were, but sweet, but figures of delight, 
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those. 

Yet seem'd it winter still and, you away, 

As with your shadow I with these did play! 

Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable 
mark 

Tovtfiov fxev IIoirjTov 

oottis prj/xa yevvalov \<xkoi, 2 

will the imagery supply when, with more than the power of the 
painter, the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the 
feeling of simultaneousness ! 

1 [Abundance has made me poor.] 

2 [There's not one hearty Poet amongst them all 

That's fit to risque an adventurous valiant phrase. 

— Frere's translation of Aristophanes' s Frogs.] 



ON POETRY AND POETIC POWER 305 

With this he breaketh from the sweet embrace 

Of those fair arms, that bound him to her breast, 

And homeward through the dark laund runs apace : 

Look how a bright star shooteth from the sky! 

So glides he in the night from Venus' eye. — Venus and Adonis, 1. 811. 

4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed 
but little, except as taken conjointly with the former; yet without 
which the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if 
this were possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes 
and a meteoric power ; — its depth and energy of thought. No 
man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a pro- 
found philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy 
of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emo- 
tions, language. In Shakespeare's Poems the creative power and 
the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its 
excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At 
length, in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its 
shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams 
that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually 
strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly and in tumult, 
but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend 
and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. The 
Venus and Adonis did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper 
passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favour, and even 
demand, their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shake- 
speare's management of the tale neither pathos nor any other dra- 
matic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery 
as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by the 
same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting 
with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying 
faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of 
knowledge and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect do- 
minion, often domination, over the whole world of language. 
What, then, shall we say? even this, that Shakespeare, no mere 
child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of 
inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it ; first studied 
patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, 
become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feel- 
ings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which 
he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class ; to that 
power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of 



306 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer, not rival. While 
the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of hu- 
man character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the 
flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the 
unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape 
themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare be- 
comes all things, yet forever remaining himself. O what great 
men hast thou not produced, England, my country ! Truly, indeed, 

Must we be free or die, who speak the tongue, 
Which Shakespeare spake ; the faith and morals hold, 
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung 
Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold. 



XV 

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
(1792-1822) 

A DEFENCE OF POETRY 

[An answer written in 1821, to Peacock's lively essay, The Four Ages of 
Poetry (Oilier' s Literary Magazine, 1820) and intended for the Liberal, but 
first published by Mrs. Shelley in the Essays, 1840.] 

According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental 
action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may 
be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one 
thought to another, however produced; and the latter, as mind 
acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own 
light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, 
each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity. 
The one is the to 77-oieii/, or the principle of synthesis, and has for its 
objects those forms which are common to universal nature and 
existence itself ; the other is the t6 Aoyifeiy, or principle of analysis, 
and its action regards the relations of things simply as relations; 
considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the alge- 
braical representations which conduct to certain general results. 
Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagina- 
tion is the perception of the value of those quantities, both sepa- 
rately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and 
imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination 
as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the 
shadow to the substance. 

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression 
of the imagination " : and poetry is connate with the origin of man. 
Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal 
impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing 

307 



308 PERCY BY S SHE SHELLEY 

wind over an ^Eolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever- 
changing melody. But there is a principle within the human 
being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts other- 
wise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, 
by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited 
to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could 
accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, 
in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can 
accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child at play 
by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions; and 
every inflection of tone and every gesture will bear exact relation 
to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which 
awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; 
and as the lyre trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, 
so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the dura- 
tion of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause. 
In relation to the objects which delight a child, these expressions 
are what poetry is to higher objects. The savage (for the savage 
is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions pro- 
duced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and 
language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, 
become the image of the combined effect of those objects, and of 
his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his passions 
and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and 
pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an 
augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and 
the imitative arts become at once the representation and the me- 
dium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the 
chord and the harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws 
from which, as from its elements, society results, begin to develop 
themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist; 
the future is contained within the present, as the plant within the 
seed : and equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, 
become the principles alone capable of affording the motives 
according to which the will of a social being is determined to action, 
inasmuch as he is social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, 
virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love 
in the intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in the infancy of 
society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct 
from that of the objects and the impressions represented by 
them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY 309 

which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those more general 
considerations which might involve an inquiry into the prin- 
ciples of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in 
which the imagination is expressed upon its forms. 

In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate 
natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a 
certain rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, 
they observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the 
melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series 
of their imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain 
order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic 
representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive 
an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other : the sense of 
an approximation to this order has been called taste by modern 
writers. Every man in the infancy of art observes an order which 
approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest 
delight results; but the diversity is not sufficiently marked, as 
that its gradations should be sensible, except in those instances 
where the predominance of this faculty of approximation to the 
beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between 
this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in whom 
it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the 
word ; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they 
express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, 
communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication 
from that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; 
that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and 
perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent 
them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of 
thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts ; and then, if no 
new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which 
have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler 
purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or relations 
are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of nature 
impressed upon the various subjects of the world" 1 — and he 
considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of 
axioms common to all knowledge. In the infancy of society 
every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; 
and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful ; in a 
word, the good which exists in the relation subsisting, first be- 

1 De Augment. Scient., cap. 1, lib. iii. 



310 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

tween existence and perception, and secondly between perception 
and expression. Every original language near to its source is 
in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness, of lexicog- 
raphy and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later 
age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations 
of poetry. 

But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible 
order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the 
dance, and architecture, and statuary,, and painting: they are 
the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the 
inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a 
certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial 
apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called 
religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or suscep- 
tible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and 
true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation 
in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the 
world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and 
unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely 
the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which 
present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in 
the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the 
fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in 
the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as 
surely as they foreknow the spirit of events : such is the pretence 
of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy 
rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates 
in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his 
conceptions, time and place and number are not. The gram- 
matical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference 
of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect 
to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry ; and the cho- 
ruses of iEschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante's Paradise, 
would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, 
if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations 
of sculpture, painting, and music are illustrations still more de- 
cisive. 

Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action 
are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be 
called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect 
as a synonym of the cause. J3ut poetry in a more restricted sense 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY 



3" 



expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical 
language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose 
throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man. And 
this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a more 
direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal 
being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate combina- 
tions than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient 
to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. For 
language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has 
relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments, 
and conditions of art have relations among each other, which 
limit and interpose between conception and expression. The 
former is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which 
enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communica- 
tion. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters, and musicians, 
although the intrinsic powers of the great masters of these arts may 
yield in no degree to that of those who have employed language 
as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled that of 
poets in the restricted sense of the term; as two performers of 
equal skill will produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. 
The fame of legislators and founders of religions, so long as their 
institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the restricted 
sense ; but it can scarcely be a question whether, if we deduct the 
celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar 
usually conciliates, together with that which belonged to them in 
their higher character of poets, any excess will remain. 

We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits 
of that art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expres- 
sion of the faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the 
circle still narrower, and to determine the distinction between 
measured and unmeasured language; for the popular division 
into prose and verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy. 

Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each 
other and towards that which they represent, and a perception 
of the order of those relations has always been found connected 
with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence 
the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and 
harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, 
and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication 
of its influence than the words themselves, without reference to 
that peculiar order. Hence the vanity of translation; it were 



312 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover 
the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse 
from one language into another the creations of a poet. The 
plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower — 
and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel. 

An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of har- 
mony in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation 
to music, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms 
of harmony and language. Yet it is by no means essential that 
a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, 
so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The prac- 
tice is indeed convenient and popular, and to be preferred, es- 
pecially in such composition as includes much action: but every 
great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his 
predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification. 
The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. 
The distinction between philosophers and poets has been antici- 
pated. Plato was essentially a poet — the truth and splendour 
of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most 
intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure 
of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to 
kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and 
he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would 
include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style. 
Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods, but with little 
success. Lord Bacon was a poet. 1 His language has a sweet and 
majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost 
superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it 
is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of 
the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the 
universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All 
the authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily 
poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the 
permanent analogy of things by images which participate in 
the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhyth- 
mical, and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being 
the echo of the eternal music. Nor are those supreme poets, 
who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of 
the form and action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving 
and teaching the truth of things, than those who have omitted 

1 See the Filum Labyrinthi, and the Essay on Death particularly. 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY 313 

that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine our- 
selves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest 
power. 

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. 
There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story 
is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection 
than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the 
creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human 
nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the 
image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only 
to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events 
which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains 
within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions 
have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, 
which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular 
facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments 
that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful applica- 
tions of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes 
have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry 
of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures 
and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror 
which makes beautiful that which is distorted. 

The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the com- 
position as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be 
considered as a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a 
series of unassimilated portions ; a single word even may be a spark 
of inextinguishable thought. And thus all the great historians, 
Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy, were poets; and although the plan 
of these writers, especially that of Livy, restrained them from 
developing this faculty in its highest degree, they made copious 
and ample amends for their subjection by filling all the interstices 
of their subjects with living images. 

Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us 
proceed to estimate its effects upon society. 

Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure : all spirits on which 
it falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled 
with its delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets them- 
selves nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry : 
for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and 
above consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations 
to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the 



314 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

strength and splendour of their union. Even in modern times, 
no living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury 
which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all 
time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by 
Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations. A poet 
is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own 
solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced 
by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved 
and softened, yet know not whence or why. The poems of Homer 
and his contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they 
were the elements of that social system which is the column upon 
which all succeeding civilization has reposed. Homer embodied 
the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we 
doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambi- 
tion of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses : the truth 
and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to 
an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations : 
the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged 
by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations, until 
from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified 
themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor let it be 
objected that these characters are remote from moral perfection, 
and that they can by no means be considered as edifying patterns 
for general imitation. Every epoch, under names more or less 
specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked 
idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit is 
the veiled image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety 
lie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries 
as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and 
which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their 
beauty. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear 
them around his soul, as he may the ancient armour or the modern 
uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress 
more graceful than either. The beauty of the internal nature 
cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture but that the 
spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, 
and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is 
worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express them- 
selves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few 
poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their 
conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY 315 

whether the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not necessary to 
temper this planetary music for mortal ears. 

The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry 
rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts 
to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science 
arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds 
schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor 
is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, 
and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But poetry 
acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the 
mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unappre- 
hended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the 
hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if 
they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and 
the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward 
in the minds of those who have once contemplated them as memo- 
rials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over 
all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret 
of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identifica- 
tion of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, 
or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine 
intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place 
of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his 
species must become his own. The great instrument of moral 
good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by 
acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the 
imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, 
which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own 
nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and inter- 
stices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens 
the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the 
same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore 
would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, 
which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical crea- 
tions, which participate in neither. By this assumption of the 
inferior office of interpreting the effect, in which perhaps after all 
he might acquit himself but imperfectly, he would resign a glory 
in a participation in the cause. There was little danger that 
Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far misunder- 
stood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest 
dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, 



316 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have fre- 
quently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is 
diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel 
us to advert to this purpose. 

Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval 
by the dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished con- 
temporaneously with all that is most perfect in the kindred expres- 
sions of the poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music, the 
dance, sculpture, philosophy, and we may add, the forms of civil 
life. For although the scheme of Athenian society was deformed 
by many imperfections which the poetry existing in chivalry and 
Christianity has erased from the habits and institutions of modern 
Europe ; yet never at any other period has so much energy, beauty, 
and virtue been developed ; never was blind strength and stubborn 
form so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of man, or 
that will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful and the true, 
as during the century which preceded the death of Socrates. Of 
no other epoch in the history of our species have we records and 
fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity in 
man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in action, or in language, 
which has rendered this epoch memorable above all others, and 
the storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For written 
poetry existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, 
and it is an idle inquiry to demand which gave and which received 
the light, which all, as from a common focus, have scattered over 
the darkest periods of succeeding time. We know no more of 
cause and effect than a constant conjunction of events: poetry 
is ever found to coexist with whatever other arts contribute to 
the happiness and perfection of man. I appeal to what has already 
been established to distinguish between the cause and the effect. 

It was at the period here adverted to that the drama had its 
birth; and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or 
surpassed those few great specimens of the Athenian drama which 
have been preserved to us, it is indisputable that the art itself 
never was understood or practised according to the true philosophy 
of it, as at Athens. For the Athenians employed language, action, 
music, painting, the dance, and religious institutions to produce 
a common effect in the representation of the highest idealisms 
of passion and of power ; each division in the art was made perfect 
in its kind by artists of the most consummate skill, and was dis- 
ciplined into a beautiful proportion and unity one towards the 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY 317 

other. On the modern stage a few only of the elements capable 
of expressing the image of the poet's conception are employed at 
once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music 
and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they 
are the fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solem- 
nity. Religious institution has indeed been usually banished 
from the stage. Our system of divesting the actor's face of a 
mask, on which the many expressions appropriate to his dramatic 
character might be moulded into one permanent and unchanging 
expression, is favourable only to a partial and inharmonious 
effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, where all the atten- 
tion may be directed to some great master of ideal mimicry. The 
modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy, though liable 
to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an extension 
of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be, as in King 
Lear, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the interven- 
tion of this principle which determines the balance in favour of 
King Lear against the (Edipus Tyr annus or the Agamemnon, or, 
if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless 
the intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter, 
should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. King Lear, 
if it can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the most 
perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world; in 
spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected 
by the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama which has pre- 
vailed in modern Europe. Calderon, in his religious Autos, has 
attempted to fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic repre- 
sentation neglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing a 
relation between the drama and religion, and the accommodating 
them to music and dancing; but he omits the observation of 
conditions still more important, and more is lost than gained by 
the substitution of the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms 
of a distorted superstition for the living impersonations of the 
truth of human passion. 

But I digress. — The connection of scenic exhibitions with the 
improvement or corruption of the manners of men has been uni- 
versally recognized; in other words, the presence or absence of 
poetry in its most perfect and universal form has been found to 
be connected with good and evil in conduct or habit. The cor- 
ruption which has been imputed to the drama as an effect, begins 
when the poetry employed in its constitution ends: I appeal to 



318 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

the history of manners whether the periods of the growth of the 
one and the decline of the other have not corresponded with an 
exactness equal to any example of moral cause and effect. 

The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have ap- 
proached to its perfection, ever coexisted with the moral and 
intellectual greatness of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian 
poets are as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, under 
a thin disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfec- 
tion and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of 
all that he loves, admires, and would become. The imagination 
is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty 
that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which 
they are conceived; the good affections are strengthened by 
pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is 
prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into the 
tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror 
and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence 
of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of 
its wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of 
their choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food 
for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self- 
respect. Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless 
reflected upon that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it 
continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided 
mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and 
divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elemen- 
tary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and 
multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the power of 
propagating its like wherever it may fall. 

But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympa- 
thizes with that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the 
form of the great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all har- 
monious accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the very 
form misunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, 
which the writer considers as moral truths ; and which are usually 
no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness 
with which the author, in common with his auditors, are infected. 
Hence what has been called the classical and domestic drama. 
Addison's Cato is a specimen of the one; and would it were not 
superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such purposes 
poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of light- 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY 



3*9 



ning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would 
contain it. And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of 
this nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect 
sentiment and passion, which, divested of imagination, are other 
names for caprice and appetite. The period in our own history 
of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II., 
when all forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be ex- 
pressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty 
and virtue. Milton stood alone illuminating an age unworthy 
of him. At such periods the calculating principle pervades all 
the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be expressed 
upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds 
to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph, in- 
stead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to 
sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Ob- 
scenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in 
life, becomes, from the very veil which it assumes, more active 
if less disgusting: it is a monster for which the corruption of 
society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret. 

The drama being that form under which a greater number of 
modes of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined 
than any other, the connection of poetry and social good is more 
observable in the drama than in whatever other form. And it is 
indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has 
ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence ; and that 
the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where 
it has once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners, and 
an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life. 
But, as Machiavelli says of political institutions, that life may 
be preserved and renewed, if men should arise capable of bring- 
ing back the drama to its principles. And this is true with respect 
to poetry in its most extended sense : all language, institution and 
form, require not only to be produced, but to be sustained : the 
office and character of a poet participates in the divine nature as 
regards providence, no less than as regards creation. 

Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance, first 
of the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many 
symbols of the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in 
Greece. The bucolic writers, who found patronage under the 
lettered tyrants of Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representa- 
tives of its most glorious reign. Their poetry is intensely melo- 



320 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

dious; like the odour of the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens 
the spirit with excess of sweetness; whilst the poetry of the pre- 
ceding age was as a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the 
fragrance of all the flowers of the field, and adds a quickening 
and harmonizing spirit of its own which endows the sense with 
a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic and 
erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness 
in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners 
and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now 
refer. Nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication 
of it, to which this want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal 
sensibility to the influence of the senses and the affections is to 
be found in the writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former, 
especially, has clothed sensual and pathetic images with irresisti- 
ble attractions. Their superiority over these succeeding writers 
consists in the presence of those thoughts which belong to the 
inner faculties of our nature, not in the absence of those which 
are connected with the external: their incomparable perfection 
consists in a harmony of the union of all. It is not what the 
erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which their imper- 
fection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets, but 
inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered 
with any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their 
age. Had that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them 
the sensibility to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which 
is imputed to them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil 
would have been achieved. For the end of social corruption is 
to destroy all sensibility to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corrup- 
tion. It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the 
core, and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom, through 
the affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid 
mass in which hardly sense survives. At the approach of such 
a period, poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which are 
the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the footsteps 
of Astraea, departing from the world. Poetry ever communicates 
all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever 
still the light of life ; the source of whatever of beautiful or gener- 
ous or true can have place in an evil time. It will readily be con- 
fessed that those among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and 
Alexandria, who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus, 
were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY 32I 

But corruption must utterly have destroyed the fabric of human 
society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that 
chain have never been entirely disjointed, which descending 
through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, 
whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, 
which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. 
It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at once of 
its own and of social renovation. And let us not circumscribe 
the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the 
sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. They may have 
perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions, simply as 
fragments and isolated portions : those who are more finely organ- 
ized, or, born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes 
to that great poem, which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts 
of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world. 
The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in 
ancient Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never 
seem to have been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. 
The Romans appear to have considered the Greeks as the selectest 
treasuries of the selectest forms of manners and of nature, and 
to have abstained from creating in measured language, sculpture, 
music, or architecture anything which might bear a particular 
relation to their own condition, whilst it should bear a general 
one to the universal constitution of the world. But we judge from 
partial evidence, and we judge perhaps partially. Ennius, Varro, 
Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have been lost. Lucretius 
is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a creator. The 
chosen delicacy of expressions of the latter are as a mist of light 
which conceal from us the intense and exceeding truth of his 
conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet Horace, 
Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the Vir- 
gilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The 
institutions also, and the religion of Rome, were less poetical than 
those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the substance. 
Hence poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than accompany, 
the perfection of political and domestic society. The true poetry 
of Rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, 
and majestic they contained, could have sprung only from the 
faculty which creates the order in which they consist. The life 
of Camillus, the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, 
in their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the 



322 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

republic to make peace with Hannibal after the battle of Cannae, 
were not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable 
personal advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in 
the shows of life, to those who were at once the poets and the act- 
ors of these immortal dramas. The imagination, beholding the 
beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own 
idea; the consequence was empire, and the reward ever-living 
fame. These things are not the less poetry, quia carent vate 
sacro. 1 They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by 
Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired 
rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their 
harmony. 

At length the ancient system of religion and manners had 
fulfilled the circle of its revolutions. And the world would have 
fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found 
poets among the authors of the Christian and chivalric systems 
of manners and religion, who created forms of opinion and action 
never before conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of 
men, became as generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. 
It is foreign to the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced 
by these systems: except that we protest, on the ground of the 
principles already established, that no portion of it can be attri- 
buted to the poetry they contain. 

It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, 
and Isaiah had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus 
and his disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by 
the biographers of this extraordinary person are all instinct with 
the most vivid poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been 
quickly distorted. At a certain period after the prevalence of a 
system of opinions founded upon those promulgated by him, 
the three forms into which Plato had distributed the faculties 
of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and became the object 
of the worship of the civilized world. Here it is to be confessed 
that "Light seems to thicken," 

" And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood, 
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, 
And night's black agents to their preys do rouse." 

But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and 
blood of this fierce chaos ! how the world, as from a resurrection, 

1 [Though they need the holy prophet to express them.] 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY 323 

balancing itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has 
reassumed its yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen 
to the music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and 
invisible wind, nourishing its everlasting course with strength 
and swiftness. 

The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology 
and institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, 
outlived the darkness and the convulsions connected with their 
growth and victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of 
manners and opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of 
the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or the predominance 
of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may have 
contained sprang from the extinction of the poetical principle, con- 
nected with the progress of despotism and superstition. Men, 
from causes too intricate to be here discussed, had become insen- 
sible and selfish : their own will had become feeble, and yet they 
were its slaves, and thence the slaves of the will of others : lust, 
fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud characterized a race amongst 
whom no one was to be found capable of creating in form, lan- 
guage, or institution. The moral anomalies of such a state of 
society are not justly to be charged upon any class of events imme- 
diately connected with them, and those events are most entitled 
to our approbation which could dissolve it most expeditiously. 
It is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish words from 
thoughts, that many of these anomalies have been incorporated 
into our popular religion. 

It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the 
poetry of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest 
themselves. The principle of equality had been discovered and 
applied by Plato in his Republic, as the theoretical rule of the 
mode in which the materials of pleasure and of power produced 
by the common skill and labour of human beings ought to be 
distributed among them. The limitations of this rule were 
asserted by him to be determined only by the sensibility of each, 
or the utility to result to all. Plato, following the doctrines of 
Timseus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual 
system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, 
and the future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged the 
sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, 
and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expres- 
sion of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiq- 



324 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

uity. The incorporation of the Celtic nations with the exhausted 
population of the south, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry 
existing in their mythology and institutions. The result was a 
sum of the action and reaction of all the causes included in it; 
for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can 
supersede any other without incorporating into itself a portion 
of that which it supersedes. The abolition of personal and do- 
mestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great part 
of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the conse- 
quences of these events. 

The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest 
political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. 
The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love 
became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. 
It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed 
with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worship- 
pers ; so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner 
world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became 
wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the 
wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its crea- 
tors were poets; and language was the instrument of their art: 
Galeotto fn il libro, e chi lo scrisse. 1 The Provencal Trouveurs, 
or inventors, preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells, which 
unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in 
the grief of love. It is impossible to feel them without becoming 
a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were super- 
fluous to explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind 
connected with these sacred emotions can render men more ami- 
able, more generous and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours 
of the little world of self. Dante understood the secret things 
of love even more than Petrarch. His Vita Nuova is an inex- 
haustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language : it is the 
idealized history of that period, and those intervals of his life 
which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis of Beatrice in 
Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, 
by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the 
throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination 
of modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the 
judgment of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the 
Divine Drama, in the measure of the admiration which they accord 

1 [Galeotto was the name of the book, and he who wrote it.] 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY 325 

to the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual 
hymn of everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in 
Plato alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus 
of the greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music 
has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown 
the dissonance of arms and superstition. At successive intervals, 
Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and 
the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of 
love, planting, as it were, trophies in the human mind of that 
sublimest victory over sensuality and force. The true relation 
borne to each other by the sexes into which human kind is dis- 
tributed has become less misunderstood; and if the error which 
confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two 
sexes has been partially recognized in the opinions and institu- 
tions of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship 
of which chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets. 

The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown 
over the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient 
world. The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante 
and his rival Milton have idealized are merely the mask and the 
mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped 
and disguised. It is a difficult question to determine how far 
they were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted 
in their minds between their own creeds and that of the people. 
Dante at least appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by 
placing Rhipaeus, whom Virgil calls justissimus units, 1 in Paradise, 
and observing a most heretical caprice in his distribution of rewards 
and punishments. And Milton's poem contains within itself 
a philosophical refutation of that system, of which, by a strange 
and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support. Noth- 
ing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of 
Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose 
that he could ever have been intended for the popular personi- 
fication of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless 
refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, 
these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not to 
be forgiven in a tyrant ; although redeemed by much that ennobles 
his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his 
conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far 
superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which 

1 [A man most just.] 



326 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, 
is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts 
the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken 
notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, 
but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new 
torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this 
shall be judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no superiority 
of moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect 
of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the su- 
premacy of Milton's genius. He mingled, as it were, the elements 
of human nature as colours upon a single pallet, and arranged 
them in the composition of his great picture according to the laws 
of epic truth; that is, according to the laws of that principle by 
which a series of actions of the external universe and of intelligent 
and ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeed- 
ing generations of mankind. The Divina Commedia and Para- 
dise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic 
form; and when change and time shall have added one more 
superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed 
upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in 
elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly 
forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of 
genius. 

Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, 
the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and 
intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion 
of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it, 
developing itself in correspondence with their development. For 
Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of 
the sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became 
his genius, had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he 
created anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of 
mock-birds, though their notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, 
Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statiug, or Claudian, have 
sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth. Milton 
was the third epic poet. For if the title of epic in its highest sense 
be refused to the JEneid, still less can it be conceded to the Orlando 
Furioso, the Gerusalemme Liberata, the Lusiad, or the Fairy 
Queen. 

Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient 
religion of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their poetry 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY 327 

probably in the same proportion as its forms survived in the unre- 
formed worship of modern Europe. The one preceded and the 
other followed the Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dante 
was the first religious reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather 
in the rudeness and acrimony than in the boldness of his censures 
of papal usurpation. Dante was the first awakener of entranced 
Europe; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, 
out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congre- 
gator of those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of 
learning; the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth 
century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven, into 
the darkness of the benighted world. His very words are instinct 
with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable 
thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, 
and pregnant with the lightning which has yet found no con- 
ductor. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which 
contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, 
and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A 
great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of 
wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has ex- 
hausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations 
enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and 
new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and 
an unconceived delight. 

The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, 
and Boccaccio was characterized by a revival of painting, sculp- 
ture, and architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, 
and the superstructure of English literature is based upon the 
materials of Italian invention. 

But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history 
of poetry and its influence on society. Be it enough to have 
pointed out the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the 
word, upon their own and all succeeding times. 

But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to 
reasoners and mechanists on another plea. It is admitted that 
the exercise of the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged 
that that of reason is more useful. Let us examine, as the grounds 
of this distinction, what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or 
good, in a general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sen- 
sitive and intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it 
acquiesces. There are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, uni- 



328 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

versal, and permanent; the other transitory and particular. 
Utility may either express the means of producing the former or 
the latter. In the former sense, whatever strengthens and puri- 
nes the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to 
sense, is useful. But a narrower meaning may be assigned to the 
word utility, confining it to express that which banishes the impor- 
tunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men 
with security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of super- 
stition, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance 
among men as may consist with the motives of personal advan- 
tage. 

Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, 
have their appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps 
of poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book 
of common life. They make space, and give time. Their exer- 
tions are of the highest value, so long as they confine their adminis- 
tration of the concerns of the inferior powers of our nature within 
the limits due to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys 
gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the French 
writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the 
imaginations of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the 
political economist combines labour, let them beware that their 
speculations, for want of correspondence with those first prin- 
ciples which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have 
in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury 
and want. They have exemplified the saying, "To him that 
hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little 
that he hath shall be taken away." The rich have become richer, 
and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is 
driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and des- 
potism. Such are the effects which must ever flow from an un- 
mitigated exercise of the calculating faculty. 

It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the defini- 
tion involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an 
inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, 
the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures 
of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, 
despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approxima- 
tion to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends 
on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the 
pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY I 329 

melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The 
pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure 
itself. And hence the saying, "It is better to go to the house of 
mourning than to the house of mirth." Not that this highest 
species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain. The delight 
of love and friendship, the ecstasy of the admiration of nature, 
the joy of the perception, and still more of the creation of poetry, 
is often wholly unalloyed. 

The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense 
is true utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure 
are poets or poetical philosophers. 

The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, 1 
and their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, 
are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calcu- 
late the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the 
world would have exhibited had they never lived. A little more 
nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and 
perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt as heretics. 
We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other 
on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all 
imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condi- 
tion of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton had ever existed; 
if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the 
Hebrew poetry had never been translated ; if a revival of the study 
of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of 
ancient sculpture had been handed down to us ; and if the poetry 
of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together 
with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the 
intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the 
invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical 
reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted 
to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative 
faculty itself. 

We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we 
know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and 
economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just dis- 
tribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these 
systems of thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and 

1 Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet. The 
others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners. 



330 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respect- 
ing what is wisest and best in morals, government, and political 
economy, or, at least, what is wiser and better than what men now 
practise and endure. But we let "I dare not wait upon I would, 
like the poor cat in the adage." We want the creative faculty to 
imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse 
to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our 
calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than 
we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have en- 
larged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, 
has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed 
those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the ele- 
ments, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivation of the 
mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the 
creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be 
attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining 
labour, to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind ? From 
what other cause has it arisen that the discoveries which should 
have lightened have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam ? 
Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible 
incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world. 

The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it 
creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; 
by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and 
arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which 
may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of 
poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from 
an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation 
of the materials of external life exceeds the quantity of the power 
of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The 
body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates 
it. 

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and 
circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all 
science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is 
at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of 
thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns 
all ; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and 
withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the suc- 
cession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and con- 
summate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odour and 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY 331 

the colour of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose 
it, as the form and splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of 
anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, 
friendship — what were the scenery of this beautiful universe 
which we inhabit ; what were our consolations on this side of the 
grave — and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did 
not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where 
the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar ? Poetry 
is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the deter- 
mination of the will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." 
The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation 
is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an incon- 
stant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises 
from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes 
as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are 
unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this 
influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible 
to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition 
begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glo- 
rious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is 
probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. 
I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day whether it is not 
an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced 
by labour and study. The toil and the delay recommended by 
critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful 
observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connection 
of the spaces between their suggestions by the intermixture of 
conventional expressions ; a necessity only imposed by the limited- 
ness of the poetical faculty itself : for Milton conceived the Para- 
dise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have 
his own authority also for the muse having "dictated" to him the 
" unpremeditated song." And let this be an answer to those who 
would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the 
Orlando Furioso. Compositions so produced are to poetry what 
mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical 
faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; 
a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as 
a child in the mother's womb ; and the very mind which directs 
the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the 
origin, the gradations, or the media of the process. 

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the 



332 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

happiest and best minds. We are aware of. evanescent visitations 
of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, 
sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising 
unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful 
beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret 
they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does 
in the nature of its object. It is, as it were, the interpenetration 
of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like 
those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and 
whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sands which paves 
it. These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced 
principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most 
enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them 
is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, 
patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; 
and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a uni- 
verse. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits 
of the most refined organization, but they can colour all that they 
combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, 
a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion will touch the 
enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experi- 
enced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image 
of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and 
most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions 
which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in 
language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing 
sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide — 
abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns 
of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry 
redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. 

Poetry turns all things to loveliness ; it exalts the beauty of that 
which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most 
deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, 
eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke 
all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and 
every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed 
by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it 
breathes : its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous 
waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of 
familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping 
beauty, which is the spirit of its forms. 



A DEFENCE OF POETRY 333 

All things exist as they are perceived : at least in relation to the 
percipient. 

" The mind is in its own place, and of itself 
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." 

But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to 
the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads 
its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from before 
the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our 
being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the famil- 
iar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which 
we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward 
sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder 
of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and 
to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, 
after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of 
impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the bold and 
true words of Tasso : Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio 
ed il Poeta. 1 

A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, 
pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the hap- 
piest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to 
his glory, let time be challenged to declare whether the fame of 
any other institutor of human life be comparable to that of a poet. 
That he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he 
is a poet, is equally incontrovertible : the greatest poets have been 
men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, 
and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most 
fortunate of men: and the exceptions, as they regard those who 
possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet inferior degree, will be 
found on consideration to confine rather than destroy the rule. 
Let us for a moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath, 
and usurping and uniting in our own persons the incompatible 
characters of accuser, witness, judge, and executioner, let us 
decide, without trial, testimony, or form, that certain motives 
of those who are "there sitting where we dare not soar," are repre- 
hensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil 
was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a mad- 
man, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a liber- 
tine, that Spenser was a poet-laureate. It is inconsistent with 

1 [No one deserves the name of creator, except God and the Poet.] 



334 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

this division of our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has 
done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their 
errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the 
balance; if their sins "were as scarlet, they are now white as 
snow " ; they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and 
redeemer, Time. Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the impu- 
tations of real or fictitious crime have been confused in the con- 
temporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how 
little is, as it appears — or appears, as it is; look to your own 
motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged. 

Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that 
it is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, 
and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection 
with the consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine 
that these are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, 
when mental effects are experienced unsusceptible of being referred 
to them. The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is 
obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind a habit of order 
and harmony correlative with its own nature and with its effects 
upon other minds. But in the intervals of inspiration, and they 
may be frequent without being durable, a poet becomes a man, 
and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of the influences under 
which others habitually live. But as he is more delicately organ- 
ized than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure, both his 
own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will 
avoid the one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned 
to this difference. And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny 
when he neglects to observe the circumstances under which these 
objects of universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves 
in one another's garments. 

But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus 
cruelty, envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil have 
never formed any portion of the popular imputations on the lives 
of poets. 

I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set 
down these remarks according to the order in which they were 
suggested to my mind by a consideration of the subject itself, 
instead of observing the formality of a polemical reply; but if the 
view which they contain be just, they will be found to involve a 
refutation of the arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards 
the first division of the subject. I can readily conjecture what 



A DEFENCE OP POETRY 335 

should have moved the gall of some learned and intelligent writers 
who quarrel with certain versifiers; I confess myself, like them, 
unwilling to be stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of 
the day. Bavius and Maevius undoubtedly are, as they ever 
were, insufferable persons. But it belongs to a philosophical 
critic to distinguish rather than confound. 

The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its ele- 
ments and principles ; and it has been shown, as well as the narrow 
limits assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry, 
in a restricted sense, has a common source with all other forms 
of order and of beauty, according to which the materials of human 
life are susceptible of being arranged, and which is poetry in an 
universal sense. 

The second part will have for its object an application of these 
principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and a 
defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners 
and opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imagi- 
native and creative faculty. For the literature of England, an 
energetic development of which has ever preceded or accompanied 
a great and free development of the national will, has arisen, as 
it were, from a new birth. In spite of the low-thoughted envy 
which would undervalue contemporary merit, our own will be a 
memorable age in intellectual achievements, and we live among 
such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any 
who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and 
religious liberty. The most unfailing herald, companion, and 
follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial 
change in opinion or institution is poetry. At such periods there 
is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving 
intense and impassioned conceptions respecting men and nature. 
The persons in whom this power resides may often, as far as 
regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent corre- 
spondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. 
But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to 
serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. 
It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated 
writers of the present day without being startled with the electric 
life which burns within their words. They measure the circum- 
ference and sound the depths of human nature with a compre- 
hensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves per- 
haps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it 



336 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hiero- 
phants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the 
gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present ; the words 
which express what they understand not; the trumpets which 
sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire ; the influence which 
is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legis- 
lators of the world. 



NOTES 



The following notes and questions aim to aid the student in the analysis 
of the foregoing selections. No attempt is made to supply data of historical 
or explanatory sort other than may be needed in the understanding of what 
the writers are driving at. The material that a critic uses, his point of view, 
and the sanctions for his views or the positive demonstration of their truth 
are what, in the opinion of the editor, are of prime importance for the student 
to comprehend. In so extensive, varied, and, in the last analysis, so personal 
a thing as literary criticism, no notes and questions can hope to be exhaustive. 
Accordingly, in the following pages, only main points are indicated, and these 
in a suggestive rather than a dogmatic way. Countless other questions will 
occur to every student and teacher, but a careful study of what is here sup- 
plied should furnish a pretty comprehensive idea of the chief sources of inter- 
est in literary criticism, of the more typical methods that it employs, and the 
types of demonstration of which critical opinion is susceptible. 

I. LESLIE STEPHEN 

Stephen's account of the work which Swift did in behalf of Ireland is an 
example of what may be termed biographical criticism, the criticism, that is, 
which interprets a man's writings in relation to his life. More particularly, 
this chapter is (i) a statement of Swift's position immediately after his leav- 
ing England on the fall of the Tory ministry, (2) a view of the political situa- 
tion in Ireland at that time, (3) a narrative of how Swift acted during the en- 
suing score of years with regard to that situation, and (4) the comments of 
the biographer on Swift's acts and writings. Of these items the first three 
are narration and exposition of known fact, and criticism enters only in so far 
as Stephen interprets these acts in one way or another. The fourth item is 
the strictly critical part of the chapter ; the critical issue regards the value of 
Swift's work. The critical questions that Stephen raises have to do with 
(1) the justice of Swift's position, (2) the practical effectiveness of his writing, 
and (3) the general worthiness of his championship of the oppressed. These 
questions are economical, political, and ethical, rather than strictly literary, 
and the evidence in support of Stephen's judgment is from ethical and 
economic standards, historical events, and a comparison with Berkeley. 
Hence the conclusions are less personal and more susceptible of proof than 
would be the conclusions of an impressionistic method. 

For that reason, the present essay is a good one from which to approach 
the study of criticism. The best way to begin such study is with pieces 
wherein the conclusions can be shown to be based on more or less, tangible 
and acceptable evidence, rather than on predilection or personal impression. 
M >k philological criticism (of necessity excluded from this volume) has this 

z 337 



338 



NOTES 



same advantage — that its standards can be more exactly applied. The per- 
sonal question does not so largely enter. 

Other examples of criticism of the same biographical sort will be found 
in such volumes as the English Men of Letters Series, especially those on 
Pope and Johnson by the same author, the Great Writers Series, the Beacon 
Biographies, particularly Professor Carpenter's Longfellow, a nice instance 
of the method, the longer articles in the Dictionary of National Biography — 
and others. Good critical essays by Stephen — many of them of a philo- 
sophical rather than a biographical character — are those of Hours in a 
Library and Studies of a Biographer. For other lives of Swift, consult 
Scott, Forster, Craik, and Collins. 

i . Analyze the selection with a view to showing the points which Stephen 
brings out. What parts are concerned with Swift's personality, character, 
and motives? What with the situation in which he found himself and the 
condition of Ireland? What conclusion does Stephen arrive at with regard 
to the value of Swift's work? Is the value of a literary, or of some other, 
kind? What is the evidence on which Stephen bases his conclusions? 

2. Compare the chapter with that on Gulliver's Travels from the same 
book; do you note any differences in the kind of critical evidence or in the 
kind of values? Write a commentary on some portion of the work of an 
author's life. 

II. DAVID MASSON 

The review of De Quincey's writings is a good example of formal literary 
classification. Like any thorough classification, it (i) gives the basis or 
principle on which the divisions are made, (2) enumerates the individuals 
in the classes and sub-classes, and (3) illustrates each class by typical exam- 
ples. It further attempts to bring out the variety and range of De Quincey's 
work and to show the relative significance and value of the different classes 
and of individual pieces. It will be noted that the basis of classification is 
mainly the ideas that are to be found in De Quincey's work, but other de- 
scriptive categories are also used. Some of these, according to the character 
of the work under discussion, are aesthetic, some have to do with the occasion 
of the work, some with structure, and some, as the description of Plato's 
Republic, with De Quincey's temperamental reactions. It will also be 
observed that the descriptions of some of the works, as Klosterheim and The 
English Mail Coach, are pretty full; these are good examples of descriptive 
summary. There is also a good deal of illustrative quotation. 

So formal a classification as this is not very common in criticism, but 
classification of some sort may be said to be implied in any good literary 
discussion whatsoever. The account of Wood's Halfpence, the preceding 
selection, for example, is really a sub-class of all Swift's writings, embracing 
those in behalf of Ireland. Again, literary classification may be made on 
different bases. A "polyhistor" like De Quincey, whose works bear singu- 
larly little relation to the course of his life, may best be approached with 
reference to his ideas, but a classification on the basis of his manner would also 
be possible. The writings of a man like Swift, on the contrary, whose life 
was passed in practical activity and who contributed little to our stock of ideas, 
though much to our amusement, were better classed by the occasion; and 
such is the scheme adopted by Stephen in his life of Swift. A classification 



notes 339 

of Swift's works into controversial articles, satires, etc., would also be pos- 
sible. With Lamb, again, a classification largely by forms, into stories, 
dramas, criticism, and essays, etc., would be convenient and would have 
the additional aptness of following pretty closely the various successive 
interests of Lamb's literary development. An example of formal literary 
classification, not so thorough as Masson's, will be found in Nichol's Carlyle 
in the English Men of Letters. 

i. Point out the parts of the present essay which (i) explain the principles 
of the classification used, (2) name the individuals, and (3) characterize the 
types and individuals. In what different ways does the critic characterize 
the work of the author ? What does Masson say of the relative value of the 
different writings of De Quincey? What of De Quincey's claim to compara- 
tive greatness? 

2. How many of these characterizations state fact, and what ones merely 
express opinion ? Do you see any reason for Masson's opinion that De Quin- 
cey's biographical sketch of Shakespeare is "the perfection of proportion" 
(p. 18)? Does Masson demonstrate his opinion of De Quincey as a critic 
(p. 31) ? What of the estimate of Levana? 

3. Point out the principle and scheme of classification in other essays in 
this volume. Make a classification of the works of some writer with whom 
you are tolerably familiar, with a view to showing his range, variety, and chief 
points of excellence. 

III. SAMUEL JOHNSON 

Johnson's famous piece of criticism is an example of that kind which 
attempts to characterize the type or genre to which a man belongs. Cowley 
is treated as the representative of a class, a fashion, or a cast of mind: John- 
son's exposition is excellent: he, following his usually systematic and simple 
intellectual methods, first characterizes his type and then illustrates it. The 
critical question at issue would, therefore, be how fairly Johnson has repre- 
sented the men he is dealing with; how far, in short, his characterization is 
a matter of fact. His judgment concerning the passages quoted is presumably 
solid and authoritative ; but more modern students differ with him in holding 
that he has not fairly represented the better side of Donne, Cowley, and 
others. 

In recent years a good deal of heed has been paid to the study of form or 
genre in literature, on the principle that individual pieces of writing may 
properly be compared only with like kinds, but that the different genres — ■ 
the epic, the lyric, the novel, etc. — have different degrees of value, and on 
the ground, too, that the proper study of literature can best proceed by pro- 
cess of isolating and tracing the origin and development of various forms. An 
important book of this type is the late F. Brunetiere's V Evolution des genres 
dans Vhistoire de la litterature, and various special books, such as Professor 
W. L. Cross's The Development of the English Novel, and Professor John 
Erskine's Elizabethan Lyric, are examples of the study. 

1. What, according to Johnson, are the chief characteristics of the 
"metaphysical poets" ? What is meant, in this essay, by "wit" ? By "art" ? 
By to " copy nature or life" ? By " singular in their thoughts" ? By "just" ? 
By "conceits" ? By "inelegant" ? By the various figures of speech in the 
quotations? By such phrases, in the opening paragraph, as "Tracing 
intellectual pleasure to its natural sources in the mind of men," etc.? 



340 NOTES 

2. In general, by what sanctions does Johnson seek to establish his posi- 
tions, in this essay ? What are his standards for critical judgment ? Com- 
pare these with the evidence that he uses in others of The Lives of the Poets, 
in, for example, his famous characterization of Pope's personality, character, 
and attainment. Test the truth of such phrases as " Sublimity is produced by 
aggregation and littleness of dispersion. Great thoughts are always general, 
and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not 
descending to minuteness" (p. 47). 

IV. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 

The present selection is an example of what is frequently called destructive 
criticism, in that it assails a received tradition and a current vogue. Macau- 
lay's point is not so much to establish principles for guidance in criticism 
as to test a given product by certain standards. What these standards are 
may be gathered from the sins of which Montgomery has been guilty, as, for 
example, to mention the chief in order of appearance : stealing of other men's 
ideas, mutilation of them, the indiscriminate use of figures, stupidity, false 
syntax, lack of harmony, gross bad taste and even blasphemy, incoherence, 
lack of sense of situation, tautology, tasteless descriptions, the presentation 
of disjointed and silly physics, metaphysics, and theology, meaningless 
phrases, etc. The standards, it is evident, are of different kinds; some are 
merely rhetorical, others have to do with philosophy, religion, the writer's 
power of observation, and good use generally. 

The critical issue of this essay, aside from the opening anathema against 
puffing, is with regard (1) to the specific fairness with which the points against 
Montgomery are made, and (2) granting their specific fairness, whether or not 
they are representative of Montgomery. It is the same question that came 
up regarding Johnson's discourse on the metaphysical poets. Another inter- 
esting point would be the actual effect of such a piece of criticism as the 
present. 

The incomplete outlines given above of the topics treated in the essay re- 
veals the fact that Macaulay approached his victim without much system. 
Structurally, the essay is a series of brilliant points, or examples, of diverse 
character, rather than a sustained thesis. Possibly this method of attack is 
better than a more formal one would be in dealing with so weak an opponent 
as Montgomery ; the rapid-fire of Macaulay' s style is very brisk and vigorous. 
Certainly there are few more lively and energetic pieces of criticism in the 
language than this. 

1. Show in each detail what Macaulay' s standards of judgment are. 
Can these be classified under one general head? If so, compare that general 
standard with those implied in the essays of Johnson, Arnold, Pater, and 
others. Compare the standards of Macaulay with those of other critics of the 
judicial type, as Johnson {Lives of the Poets) or Jeffrey. (See L. E. Gates's 
Selections jrom Jeffrey.) Compare the present essay with such essays as 
those of Mr. J. M. Robertson on Arnold, Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson, and 
others in Modern Humanists, to note any difference in standards. 

2. Are the points made by Macaulay well taken ? Are they of equal im- 
portance? Does he really prove that Montgomery was a plagiarist? Are 
these points representative of Montgomery? Is Montgomery assailed as a 
person or as a typically bad example ? 



NOTES 341 

3. Look into the history of the effect of this essay and see if you can deter- 
mine why it may have accomplished its end, and why Jeffrey's equally vehe- 
ment onslaughts on Wordsworth are looked upon as failures. 



V. WALTER BAGEHOT 

Bagehot's essay on Dickens's novels is an attempt to make one of those 
estimates of an author which is called a review, for the convenience and 
enlightenment of actual and prospective readers. This issue is stated clearly 
in the third paragraph. Admitting the greatness and the vogue of Dickens, 
Bagehot's aim is to classify Dickens's genius and to show the characteristic 
excellences and defects which emanate from it, and of which it is illustrative. 
This aim Bagehot carries out by his very broad division of men of genius into 
the regular and the irregular, with the accompanying illustrations of each 
type and the orderly analysis of Dickens's qualities which illustrate the type 
to which he belongs. 

Throughout the essay Bagehot deals with these large opposing types, 
best illustrated by the fundamental dichotomy of "regular" and "irregular." 
His classification of novels into the "ubiquitous" and the "sentimental" is 
another case in point. The same trait is to be observed in other essays by 
the same hand: for example, in Shakespeare The Man (1853), Bagehot, by 
a series of contrasted general types — as the "experiencing mind" (illustrated 
by Shakespeare), the mind that grows by contact with new experience, and 
that which is, as it were, " cast" from the start — he arrives at a tolerably full 
characterization of the poet. It is obvious that the soundness of Bagehot's 
criticism must in a large measure depend on the common sense of these fun- 
damental distinctions. They are not at all distinctions of impression, subtle 
phrasings — as with Pater, in the following essay — of the critic's own feeling 
for the object, but are so broad and obvious as to be as self-evident as axioms 
in mathematics. Some, of course, are pretty obvious. These distinctions are 
evidently the chief standard of judgment by which Bagehot measures his 
subjects, and they possess to a high degree the quality that is called "insight." 

It is evident, also, that Bagehot here, as in other essays, like those of 
Hartley Coleridge, Bishop Butler, Wordsworth, and others, is interested in 
his subject chiefly as a type of mind or of art. In Wordsworth, Tennyson, and 
Browning; on Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in Poetry (1864), for example, 
Bagehot cares for the poets primarily as illustrations of a type of art; Tenny- 
son, say, represents the kind of writing which gains its effects from accumu- 
lation of details rather than by repression. The truth or falsity of such views 
can be ascertained by an examination of the data supplied by Tennyson's 
poetry. Only it must be remembered that Bagehot's distinctions are always 
broad, and might be unsound when applied to a few minute matters. Nor 
should it be forgotten that an entirely different set of data might strike another 
critic. The proof of the matter, then, besides being axiomatic, depends on 
the aptness of illustration, and that is of a very high order in Bagehot's work. 

Types of critical writing which, like the present essay, attempt to place 
before the reader critical data for judgment are to be found in such essays 
(inferior to this in point of soundness of proof and material) as Arnold's 
Wordsworth (Essays in Criticism, Second Series), an attempt to show the 
causes which have kept that poet from his just due, and Mr. Mor ley's Macau- 



342 NOTES 

lay {Miscellanies, Vol. I.), a preparatory lecture for the reading of Trevelyan's 
Life of Macaulay. A classic essay dealing with a broad distinction is Ruskin's 
chapter on the Pathetic Fallacy {Modern Painters, Vol. III.), or Arnold's 
distinction between the "grand style simple" and the "grand style severe" 
{On Translating Homer). 

One cannot dismiss Bagehot without some mention of the brilliance and 
vigor of his style. Occasionally unorthodox in syntactic relation, it is probably 
unsurpassed by that of any English critic in happiness of phrasing. "He 
describes London like a special correspondent for posterity" is a case in 
point, as are his larger characterizations of novels (p. 88) and his analysis 
of the way Dickens saw things (pp. 90-94). 

1. Point out the special question at issue in this essay. Show how the 
two types of genius are fundamental to the discussion which follows. Show 
in detail what topics Bagehot speaks of in the successive paragraphs. 

2. Explain in detail the standards that Bagehot uses in characterizing 
Dickens. What standards are employed or implied in the comparison, for 
example, of unusual people, like Pickwick and Falstaff, with "real" people 
(pp. 96-97) ? What is the standard in Bagehot's discussion of Dickens's 
politics (pp. 102-104) and his education (pp. 107-109) ? 



VI. WALTER PATER 

The very graceful essay on Wordsworth belongs to that type of criticism 
broadly called appreciation — which attempts not so much to try an author 
by a priori reasoning as to state his valuable qualities. Pater's own defi- 
nition of the term occurs in the preface to the Renaissance (p. xi) : "The 
function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, analyze, and separate from 
its adjuncts the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in 
life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to 
indicate what the source of that impression is and under what condition it 
is experienced." Following this formula, Pater's aim is, therefore, to find 
the peculiar virtue of Wordsworth; the issue is expressed in the latter half of 
the fourth paragraph (p. 113). The essay then expounds the peculiar virtue 
of Wordsworth from several points of view — his character and material, 
his beliefs and philosophy, his manner, the constant trend of his thinking 
toward contemplation; and the essay ends with a short summary of his 
quality and value. 

• The essay is, broadly speaking, an impression of Wordsworth. It does 
not, however, confine itself to a statement of likes and dislikes, but rather 
deals with generalizations which Pater makes from facts which, from various 
points of view, he has observed of Wordsworth's best work. The sanctions 
for Pater's views are, therefore, observation of phenomena of spiritual im- 
port and, secondarily, the agreement which these views might have with other 
writers on the same subject, together with the response and agreement which 
the criticism might arouse in the mind of a reader. As information or fact, 
the essay is merely an exposition of what Pater himself saw and felt, and in 
this sense it merely carries out the sentence quoted in the introduction to this 
book : " What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct 
abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of tempera- 
ment, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects." 



NOTES 343 

In thus making criticism simply a matter of sensuous perception, Pater is, 
within these limits, on wholly safe ground, and is "scientific" in so far as he 
expounds merely this fact that appears to him. Where it lacks complete- 
ness would be in its failure to take into consideration facts of vogue and agree- 
ment, and such rational tests as might be applied for the ascertaining of the 
"real" value of Wordsworth. 

Criticism of this type abounds in Pater's work; indeed he is the best rep- 
resentative of this school in English. Appreciations and The Renaissance 
are the most valuable books for study. An interesting excursion into criticism 
can be made by comparing the point of view, the material, and the proof of 
several essays on Wordsworth (or any other notable writer) ; for example, 
those by Jeffrey on The Excursion and The White Doe of Rhylstone, Coleridge 
in Biographia Liter aria, Hazlitt in The Spirit of the Age and elsewhere, De 
Quincey in Literary Reminiscences, F. W. Robertson in Lectures and Addresses, 
Bagehot in Literary Studies, Vol. II., Lowell in Prose Works, Vol. IV., Arnold 
in Essays in Criticism, Second Series, Mr. Swinburne in Miscellanies, Mr. 
Morley in Studies in Literature, Stephen in Hours in a Library, Vol. II., 
Professor Woodberry in Makers of Literature, and others. 

i. State the main classes of material that Pater uses in this essay. Show 
in detail what he brings out under each general head. To what degree does 
Pater deal with Wordsworth's personality, character, life, ideas, and manner ? 

2. What are Pater's standards of judgment? How does he demonstrate 
the truth of his propositions? To what extent is he in agreement with other 
writers on the subject ? What are the main differences between his method 
and treatment and that of other critics of Wordsworth. 



VII. JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

The essay on Poe, says Mr. Robertson, in the preface to New Essays 
towards a Critical Method, is the only one in that volume which, perhaps, 
"comes near applying all the tests mentioned in the preliminary essay on 
The Theory and Practice of Criticism as proper to a critical inquiry." The 
gist of that excellent essay, with which all students of criticism should be 
familiar, is that in the formation of literary judgments all possible points of 
view and all the material furnished by an author should be considered, and 
that in this consideration all possible tests, literary, logical, argumentative, 
scientific, comparative, etc., should be employed. Discussion of these various 
points would occupy a larger space than may here be given. 

For present purposes the essay on Poe is a new type of criticism. It may 
be called "scientific" in so far as it attempts to take a complete view of the 
facts and in so far as it attempts to establish facts by reasoning rather than pre- 
dilection. In one sense, it may be called "collective," in that it states from 
time to time, as points of departure, enough opinions about Poe to arrive at 
some notion of the general consensus. It is historical in that it gives a good 
idea of the growth of Poe's reputation; though this part is incidental and not 
consecutive. 

As "collective criticism" it is important to note that Mr. Robertson takes 
more completely into consideration than any other writer of this volume the 
facts of the vogue of his author and antecedent critical opinion. His cita- 
tion of other critics is not, as with many writers, merely for the sake of a text 



344 NOTES 

for his own views, but serves also as material for controversy and an attempt 
to arrive at the truth on demonstrable grounds. The critique is therefore 
more than a summary of historical facts or statement of vogue (things, indeed, 
too often neglected in criticism!), such as Professor Nichol's statement of 
Carlyle's influence (Carlyle in the English Men of Letters) or Mr. Sidney Lee's 
chapter on Shakespeare's Posthumous Reputation (Life of Shakespeare). 

i. What points regarding Poe does Mr. Robertson cite as material for 
criticism? (Compare Science in Criticism in Essays towards a Critical 
Method.) What classification of material does he make? Compare the 
method and purpose of his classification with that of Professor Masson's 
classification of De Quincey's writings? What points are made in each of 
the separate sections? Make a summary of the essay. 

2. What is Mr. Robertson's answer to the " theory of development" 
(p. 139) ? Why is it "expedient " to follow Mr. Stedman, on p. 141, and not 
on p. 1 78 ? What are the canons by which Mr. Robertson criticises The Raven, 
Lenore, and The Bells (pp. 142-144) ? What is Mr. Robertson's idea of 
"total performance" (p. 154)? of realism (pp. 157-159)? of Poe' s type as a 
realistic prose writer (pp. 1 5 7-1 59) ? of much contemporary criticism (passim) ? 

3. What sort of critical inquiry does Mr. Robertson employ at different 
points of his essay ? On what grounds are his views demonstrable ? How far do 
taste and liking enter into his conclusions ? Answer these questions in detail. 

4. Try to find other examples of "collective" criticism in books of essays 
and biographies. 

VIII. JOHN DRYDEN 

The celebrated Preface to the Fables, commonly regarded as one of the 
masterpieces of English criticism, appeared a few months before Dryden's 
death. This was prefixed to a volume of translations and adaptations, which 
bore the title Fables, Ancient and Modern, translated into Verse from Homer, 
Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer : with Original Poems. The Preface as it stands 
is chiefly a criticism of Chaucer, renowned for its catholicity of taste, but it 
contains also comparisons of the different poets named in the title, and a de- 
fence of his own conduct from charges made against him by Blackmore, Mil- 
bourn, and, particularly, Jeremy Collier, whose Short View of the Prof one- 
ness of the English Stage (1698) had attacked the plays of Dryden, among 
others. 

The Preface illustrates the general character of Dryden's criticism; like 
all his other pieces, it is occasional, and seems to indicate the things that he 
was interested in and the principles that he devised and employed. It is a 
very interesting study to trace the change in material and the critical prin- 
ciples which these prefaces show, and for this study Mr. W. P. Ker's Essays 
of John Dryden is a valuable book. 

In this particular essay are to be noted the pleasure that Dryden evi- 
dently has in literature, his desire to show the letters of his country in the best 
light, his catholicity of temper, and the gentlemanly discursiveness of his 
style. The principles which he enunciates in passing are interesting: 
the favor of the reader, common-sense, and moderation, are evidently the 
chief court of appeal, but he also recognized ideas of growth in language and 
the necessity of moral standards. Once only, and then in a vague way 
(p. 198) he cites authority — that of Aristotle. 



NOTES 345 

Dryden employs a method" of comparison, balancing Homer and Virgil, 
Chaucer and Ovid, Chaucer and Boccaccio, Chaucer and Horace and Virgil. 
The material comprises facts of life, of personality, of time and place, of char- 
acter, of learning, of style, of invention, of imagination, of structural design 
(which Dryden regards as very important in the determination of the result), 
of understanding of the subject, of verisimilitude, of dramatic naturalness 
and taste, of good sense and judgment, the "following of nature," of style 
and verse and harmony, and such things. Under some of these heads his 
facts are wrong, as in his attributing of Piers Ploughman to Chaucer, and his 
strictures on Chaucer's verse, and, in general, his knowledge does not, in all 
ways, correspond to our own (cf. Lounsbury's Studies in Chancer, for a more 
modern view of the facts), but wherein he fails is because of deficient know- 
ledge rather than by reason of unsound judgment on the evidence ; in both 
knowledge and taste he was, as we are fond of thinking, far in advance of 
his age. 

i. Make an analysis of the topics of Dryden' s essay. Point out any 
other principles besides those enumerated that you have noticed, and also 
show the points of comparison on which the critical findings rest. What 
does Dryden say with regard to the relative value of these points of interest ? 
What does he say of "conceits," and how sound are his reasons? 

2. Compare the present essay with the Epistle Dedicatory to the Rival 
Ladies (1664, Ker, Vol. I., p. 1) with a view to showing the difference of mate- 
rial in each. With the preface to Annus Mirabilis (1666, Ker, Vol. I., p. 10). 
With the essay on Heroic Plays (1672, Ker, Vol. I., p. 148), and others. 
Compare it, in point of material, critical principles, appeal to authority, 
method of arriving at judgments, and form, with the celebrated Essay of 
Dramatic Poesy, 1668. 

Compare Dryden from these points of view with preceding and succeed- 
ing critics, such as Sidney, Ben Jonson, Addison, and Samuel Johnson. 

IX. FREDERIC HARRISON 

The essay on Ruskin illustrates a not uncommon type of critical writing, 
in that it aims primarily to take neither a general survey of a man's work nor 
to present a theory of art, but to expound and estimate specific excellences. 
This purpose the author states in paragraph 2 (p. 202) and again in para- 
graph 8 (p. 204). It is carried out in two chief ways, after some discussion 
of the more general aspects of Ruskin's character and teaching: (1) by 
various adjectives characterizing Ruskin's prose and (2) by some analysis 
of the "consonance" of his sentences. There is also a division of a not un- 
common type, especially in art criticism, into "earlier" and "later" manner, 
with some explanation of each. 

Of neither of these points, the general characteristics and the " consonance," 
is Mr. Harrison's analysis ver)' definite. With regard to the first, he uses 
with great frequency such categories as "precious," "grotesque," "noble," 
"eccentric," "obtrusively luscious," which are somewhat in the air, but with 
regard to the actual length of some of Ruskin's periods he is more exact, if not 
more luminous. The terms quoted evidently imply some standard of perfect 
prose, — like Arnold's phrase, "regularity, uniformity, precision, balance" 
{The Study of Poetry), — but what this standard is probably no critics agree. 
Indeed it is probably impossible of determination. Attempts have been 



346 



NOTES 



made to limit and define good English prose in an arbitrary, a priori way by 
saying that it should contain a fixed proportion of Latin words to Anglo- 
Saxon words, and some authors have found hope in the word-length of 
sentences; but these attempts merely supply more or less interesting and in- 
structive data. Such data Mr. Harrison recognizes merely as illustrative of 
something extraordinary in Ruskin's periods. He also recognizes the patent 
fact of relativity in prose, or of types of style, as that of the preacher or the 
philosopher (p. 206). 

The second point, that of "consonance," is one that has been more thor- 
oughly studied, along with other things, in connection with verse rather than 
as an adjunct to prose. There are probably no such good analyses of prose 
as of verse, for example, Professor Gummere's Handbook of Poetics, or 
Professor Alden's English Verse. Mr. Harrison's remark that he knew no 
systematic study of the subject is undoubtedly true, but Stevenson's analysis 
of this element in On Style in Literature (cf. my Representative Essays on 
the Theory of Style) antedates this essay by ten years, and is also more 
thorough. (Cf. also my Studies in Structure and Style in relation to Ruskin.) 

Mr. Harrison is wrong when he says (p. 215, n.) that Ruskin's sentence of 
619 words is possibly "the most gigantic sentence in English prose." There 
is one in Hazlitt's sketch of Coleridge in The Spirit of the Age of 848 words, 
which, however, could, like most prize sentences, have been broken by slight 
changes of punctuation. It is so interesting in its effect and in its rhythm 
that it may be quoted : — 

"Next, he was engaged with Hartley's tribes of mind, 'etherial braid, 
thought-woven,' — and he busied himself for a year or two with vibrations 
and vibratiuncles, and the great law of association that binds all things in 
mystic chain, and the doctrine of Necessity (the mild teacher of Charity) 
and the Millennium, anticipative of a life to come — and he plunged deep into 
the controversy on Matter and Spirit, and, as an escape from Dr. Priestly' s 
Materialism, where he felt himself imprisoned by the logician's spell, like 
Ariel in the cloven pine-tree, he became suddenly enamoured of Bishop 
Berkeley's fairy-world, 1 and used in all companies to build the universe, like 
a brave poetical fiction, of fine words — and he was deep-read in Malebranche 
and in Cudworth's Intellectual System (a huge pile of learning, unwieldy, 
enormous) and in Lord Brook's hieroglyphic theories, and in Bishop Butler's 
Sermons, and in the Duchess of Newcastle's fantastic folios, and in Clarke 
and South and Tillotson, and all the fine thinkers and masculine reasoners 
of that age — and Leibnitz's P re-Established Harmony reared its arch above 
his head, like the rainbow in the cloud, covenanting with the hopes of man 
— and then he fell plump, ten thousand fathoms down (but his wings saved 
him harmless) into the hortus siccus of Dissent, where he pared religion down 
to the standard of reason, and stripped faith of mystery, and preached Christ 
crucified and the Unity of the Godhead, and so dwelt for a while in the spirit 

1 Mr. Coleridge named his eldest son (the writer of some beautiful Sonnets) 
after Hartley, and the second after Berkeley. The third was called Derwent, 
after the river of that name. Nothing can be more characteristic of his mind 
than this circumstance. All his ideas indeed are like a river, flowing on forever, 
and still murmuring as it flows, discharging its waters and still replenished — 

' And so by many winding nooks it strays, 
With willing sport to the wild ocean ! ' 



NOTES 2>tf 

with John Huss and Jerome of Prague and Socinus and old John Zisca, and 
ran through Neal's history of the Puritans and Calamy's Non-Conformists' 
Memorial, having like thoughts and passions with them — but then Spinoza 
became his God, and he took up the vast chain of being in his hand, and the 
round world became the centre and the soul of things in some shadowy 
sense, forlorn of meaning, and around him he beheld the living traces and the 
sky-pointing proportions of the mighty Pan — but poetry redeemed him from 
this spectral philosophy, and he bathed his heart in beauty, and gazed at the 
golden light of heaven, and drank of the spirit of the universe, and wandered 
at eve by fairy-stream or fountain, 

' — When he saw nought but beauty, 
When he beard the voice of that Almighty One 
In every breeze that blew or wave that murmured ' — 

and wedded with truth in Plato's shade, and in the writings of Proclus 
and Plotinus saw the ideas of things in the eternal mind, and unfolded all 
mysteries with the Schoolmen and fathomed the depths of Duns Scotus and 
Thomas Aquinas, and entered the third heaven with Jacob Behmen, and 
walked hand in hand with Swedenborg through the pavilions of the New 
Jerusalem, and sung his faith in the promise and in the word in his Reli- 
gious Musings — and lowering himself from that dizzy height, poised himself 
on Milton's wings, and spread out his thoughts in charity with the glad prose 
of Jeremy Taylor, and wept over Bowles's Sonnets, and studied Cowper's 
blank verse, and betook himself to Thomson's Castle of Indolence, and sported 
with the wits of Charles the Second's days and of Queen Anne, and relished 
Swift's style and that of the John Bull (Arbuthnot's we mean, not Mr. 
Croker's), and dallied with the British Essayists. and Novelists, and knew all 
qualities of more modern writers with a learned spirit, Johnson, and Gold- 
smith, and Junius, and Burke, and Godwin, and the Sorrows of Werter, 
and Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire, and Marivaux, and Crebillon, 
and thousands more — now 'laughed with Rabelais in his easy chair' or 
pointed to Hogarth, or afterwards dwelt on Claude's classic scenes, or spoke 
with rapture of Raphael, and compared the women at Rome to figures that 
had walked out of his pictures, or visited the Oratory of Pisa, and described 
the works of Giotto and Ghirlandaio and Massaccio, and gave the moral of 
the picture of the Triumph of Death, where the beggars and the wretched 
invoke his dreadful dart, but the rich and mighty of the earth quail and 
shrink before it ; and in that land of siren sights and sounds, saw a dance of 
peasant girls, and was charmed with lutes and gondolas, — or wandered into 
Germany and lost himself in the labyrinths of the Hartz Forest and of the 
Kantean philosophy, and amongst the cabalistic names of Fichte and Schel- 
ling and Lessing, and God knows who — this was long after, but all the for- 
mer while he had nerved his heart and filled his eyes with tears, as he hailed 
the rising orb of liberty, since quenched in darkness and in blood, and had 
kindled his affections at the blaze of the French Revolution, and sang for joy 
when the towers of the Bastile and the proud places of the insolent and the 
oppressor fell, and would have floated his bark, freighted with fondest fancies, 
across the Atlantic wave with Southey and others to seek for peace and free- 
dom: — > 

' In Philarmonia's undivided dale ! ' 



348 



NOTES 



In general, Mr. Harrison's essay is somewhat loose in structure. As has 
been said, he states his point at issue a couple of times at least, frequently 
digresses from this to discuss Ruskin's ideas and his own likes and dislikes, 
and is obsessed with the length of Ruskin's sentences. 

i. Point out the main topics of Mr. Harrison's essay and show what he 
is treating in each paragraph. What is the special topic, or critical issue, of 
his essay ? Show how he brings this out and where he diverges from it. 

2. Does Mr. Harrison use largely categories of demonstrable fact, or does 
he frequently deal with terms equivalent, in general, to "good" or "bad"? 
What, with regard to the preceding question, is implied in such a sentence as 
this (p. 21 1): "The piece is overwrought as well as unjust, with some- 
what false emphasis, but how splendid in colour and majestic in language" ? 
Or this (p. 219) : "Every other faculty of a great master of speech, except 
reserve, husbanding of resources, and patience, he possesses in a measure 
most abundant — lucidity, purity, brilliance, elasticity, wit, fire, passion, 
imagination, majesty, with a mastery over all the melody of cadence that has 
no rival in the whole range of English literature"? Or this (p. 211): 
" Stained as usual with the original sin of Calvinism" ? Or by the "perfect 
style" (p. 205)? Compare On English Prose in the same volume from 
which this essay is taken (or Representative Essays on the Theory of Style). 
Make a catalogue of the categories which Mr. Harrison employs, with a view 
to ascertaining his standards and the sanctions or proofs for them. 

3. State Mr. Harrison's theory of "Consonance." Compare it with 
Stevenson's in On Style in Literature. Do you notice any defects in the 
theory? Test by this theory any passage that seems to you to be good. 

4. Point out other English critics, such as Hazlitt, who have made large 
use of aesthetic categories in their criticism. 

X. CHARLES LAMB 

Lamb's famous essay on Shakespeare, perhaps his most conspicuous piece 
of criticism, is as good an example as can be found of that paradoxical type 
which rests on personality and a wholly a priori premise. That premise 
is expressed in these words : "They [Shakespeare's plays] being in themselves 
essentially so different from all others" (p. 228). Following from this, the 
critical proposition is: "I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of 
Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of 
almost any other dramatist whatever" (p. 222). This position Lamb main- 
tains in a series of very brilliantly phrased reasons, of which that about Lear 
(p. 231) is classic in its eloquence and an excellent example of the dominance 
of taste in criticism. 

The chief positions of the essay are these : (1) The inner life which Shake- 
speare represents is unfitted to the capacity of audiences which can appre- 
ciate only a story, action, or vociferous talk; (2) acting, even of a great sort, 
like that of Mrs. Siddons, tends to level, or to raise to the same level, both 
bad and good sentiments; (3) the tragedy of the mind, of Lear and Othello, 
for example, may not be represented except to the imagination; (4) stage 
mechanism is inadequate to picture the beauty of Shakespeare's scenes, as 
those of The Tempest. 

It is evident that many fallacies are rampant in Lamb's argument. His- 
torically, for example, it is a fact that the plays were, despite Lamb's interpre- 



NOTES. 349 

tation, written to be acted. Again Lamb confuses the distinction between 
good and bad acting. Furthermore, there is no reason why any play may not 
be acted, since we learn of tragic or spiritual happenings only by words and 
acts, media, that is, at the command of the actor, and it is doubtful, for psycho- 
logical reasons, whether the reading of plays, which Lamb approves, may not 
be objected to on much the same grounds as the seeing of the stage presenta- 
tion. Such phrases, too, as "I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be 
acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted" (p. 224), 
contain fallacies; for that sentence implies an absolute Hamlet, which is 
impossible. Lamb's objection would apply to any interpretation or reading, 
and yet Lamb, with charming inconsistence, practically allows us to im- 
agine any Hamlet we like; for he says (p. 222) that in seeing a Shakespearian 
play, "We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance." 
Other paradoxes will appear to the reader. 

"The truth is," to use a phrase of Lamb's since widely employed by 
many impressionists, that Lamb's criticism is hardly more than the expres- 
sion of his personal predilection, put in an eloquent form. The fundamental 
premise quoted in the first paragraph of this note is strictly undemonstrable. 
It is one of the curiosities of criticism, both historically and psychologically, 
to note how different this premise is from that which a century and more ear- 
lier assumed Shakespeare to be ' a barbarian. No more really rational 
grounds can be assigned for one than for the other; but the change in taste 
is extreme. It is a matter of curiosity, in like manner, to note the reasons 
which Lamb's great contemporaries, Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and 
others, gave for holding a premise akin to that of Lamb. Shakespeare was 
to all these men, in the words of De Quincey, "the glory of the human intel- 
lect" {Shakespeare, 1838), yet the reasons why he was so great differ with 
their authors. His imaginative height is what strikes Lamb; with Coleridge, 
for example, it is some six or eight qualities of his mind {Lectures on Shake- 
speare), whereas De Quincey lays especial stress on what might be called 
Shakespeare's intellectual contribution. These dicta are, of course, quite 
as illuminating with regard to the personality of the authors as with regard to 
Shakespeare, and they very well illustrate the role played by temperament 
and predilection in criticism. They are really a very dignified expression of 
likes and dislikes. . Their strength lies in the earnest and brilliant expression 
of the authors, and they may be regarded as literature rather than as science. 

1. State Lamb's thesis and show the points that he makes in support of it. 
What is the demonstration or evidence for his various positions? What is 
meant by such phrases as "a proper reverence for Shakespeare "? (p. 229.) 

2. Analyze such dicta as " The love-dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those 
silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night; the more intimate sacred 
sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus with their 
married wives, all those delicacies which are so delightful in the reading — 
by the inherent fault of stage representation," etc. (p. 223), with a view to 
testing its universal soundness and to showing how much truth it contains. 
How does the passage containing the words " torn so inhumanly from its living 
place and principle of continuity in the play" (p. 222) square with Lamb's 
own procedure in his Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets ? 

3. Compare the thesis held by Lamb and his method with the theses and 
the method of contemporary paradoxical critics, such as Tolstoy in What is 
Art? or Mr. Bernard Shaw in the introductions to his various volumes of 



350 NOTES 

plays, or Mr. G. K. Chesterton in Varied Types, Heretics, and his biographies 
of Browning and Dickens. What are the sanctions for the opinions held by 
these critics? 

4. Trace the growth of critical tests regarding Shakespeare from the time 
of Dryden to Lamb, with a view to showing the steps by which the change 
took place. Ascertain the influence of Lamb's position on contemporary and 
subsequent criticism. These are very large topics, too large for most college 
students to handle. One should have recourse to Professor Saintsbury's 
History of Criticism, Professor Lounsbury's The Text of Shakespeare, and 
many other books, besides the periodicals of the time and the work of critics 
such as Johnson, Coleridge, and Hazlitt. 

XL HENRY JAMES 

As is said in the opening paragraph, Mr. James's essay on The Art of 
Fiction is a discussion of the address of the same name by the late Sir Walter 
Besant, delivered at the Royal Institution, April 25, 1884. The present 
essay provoked a lively answer from Robert Louis Stevenson entitled A 
Humble Remonstrance, originally published in Longmans' Magazine (v. p. 139) 
and since reprinted in Memories and Portraits. The purport of Besant's 
address is to be gathered from Mr. James's pages; but it would be an illu- 
minating study in criticism for the reader to examine the material, the point 
of view, and the sanctions of other essays and books on the subject. (See 
Gayley and Scott, Introduction, and my Specimens of Narration for more 
or less complete bibliography.) 

The present discussion, as Mr. James is fond of reiterating, assumes the 
point of view of the producer. All that the latter is really obliged to do is to 
make his treatment of whatever subject he may choose an interesting one. 
He should be bound by no canons and by no rules, except the artistic obliga- 
tion of getting the best po?sible execution for his material. Unlike Besant, 
Mr. James gives no directions for the writing of novels and no counsel to the 
reader for judging their worth, except such as are implied in such words as 
"treatment" and "interesting." The vagueness of these terms Mr. James 
admits when he says that no two readers will be interested in or impressed 
by the same thing. Thus it will be seen that Mr. James's criteria have noth- 
ing at all absolute in them; the treatment and the question of excellence is 
related, not to an ideal of novel writing, but to the material and the artistic 
impulse of the writer. In practically denying the ideal and the absolutely 
good, of which actual novels would be, as it were, more or less inexact repli- 
cas, he is, philosophically, quite at variance with the fundamental assump- 
tions of the four essays on poetry which follow this. 

Like these essays, Mr. James's work might be called constructive as op- 
posed to destructive in that it tries to establish a principle for the understand- 
ing of an art. Mr. James would doubtless repudiate the term constructive, 
on the same grounds which make such terms as romantic and the novel of 
character appear to him to be clumsy and inexact, and he would strictly be 
right. No vigorous piece of destructive criticism such, for example, as Macau- 
lay's essay on Montgomery, fails to imply some constructive principle; and, 
on the other hand, a piece of so-called constructive criticism by implication 
is damaging to works which do not accord with the principle which it is estab- 
lishing. It is impossible, actually, with the same exactness which would 



NOTES .351 

characterize a building contractor, to say in literature where abstractiveness 
ends and constructiveness begins. However, the critical question here at 
issue regards the proof of Mr. James's skilfully wrought and brilliantly 
phrased exposition. 

1. Explain the thesis of the essay. What sort of counsel has Besant 
offered to writers? What is Mr. James's answer to these points? What is 
meant in this essay by such terms as the "novel of incident," the "novel of 
character," the "romance," "the good novel and the bad novel," "life," 
" taste," "morality," "interesting," etc. ? Why, of the novels cited, does Mr. 
James call some failures and some successes? What is Mr. James's test for 
a novel? Explain and test such sentences as "Catching the very note and 
trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous 
force keeps Fiction upon her feet" (p. 250). 

2. On what grounds can Mr. James's position be supported or be over- 
thrown ? Are his views rational or are they personal ? What light is afforded 
by the fact that the distinctions which Mr. James denies are actually in com- 
mon use? Consult Bliss Perry: A Study of Prose Fiction; W. L. Cross: 
The Development of the English Novel; W. D. Howells's Criticism and 
Fiction, etc. 

XII. EDGAR ALLAN POE 

Poe's very brief exposition of the way in which he wrote The Raven is, 
whether strictly serious or not, an admirable piece of literary analysis. It is 
so clear that it needs little further comment, but one may remark that it is 
in general an exposition, first, of the theory of poetry and, next, of the ap- 
plication of the principles laid down to a particular situation. If Poe's prem- 
ises are sound, — that a poem, depending as it does on conditions of limited 
duration, must be short in length, that beauty must be its object, that the 
most beautiful matter is the idea of death, etc., — then it would follow that 
The Raven must be the most beautiful poem in existence, unless possibly sur- 
passed by poems of a like character and better execution. With this extreme 
judgment criticism would hardly be in accord, and the divergence would re- 
late either to the theory or to its working out in metre, refrain, machinery, 
and the like. As a matter of fact, poetry has never been successfully defined 
to square with all theories; the essays of Arnold, Coleridge, and Shelley in 
this volume are based on other fundamental conceptions as difficult to demon- 
strate as this. Poe is consistent in his theory; it is the same as that enun- 
ciated in his well-known Poetic Principle. 

1. State Poe's theory of poetry, showing what, in his view, are the char- 
acteristics of a poem. Show how these are applied in the composition of The 
Raven. What does he mean by "incident," " tone," " effect," "universality," 
etc.? Apply these principles to such poems as Ulalume and Annabel Lee. 
Do they apply to typical lyrics of Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, 
and others ? On what proof do they rest ? 

2. What of the title of this essay as related to the matter under discus- 
sion? 

XIII. MATTHEW ARNOLD 

The structure of Arnold's essay, like that of Poe's, is clear and simple. 
The essay consists of two parts, a statement of the principles of procedure and 
the application of them to typical examples. The principles of procedure 



352 NOTES 

are the recognition of poetry as a thing of supreme value and importance, the 
consequent necessity of holding fast to the best poetry, the avoidance of the 
fallacies of the historical estimate and the personal estimate, and the em- 
ployment of touchstones as the best means of determining what real poetry 
is. If this theory is right and if it can be applied fairly, it is evident, as with 
Poe's essay, that Arnold's particular judgments must be sound. The main 
critical question at issue, then, regards Arnold's theory. 

With regard to his theory, two facts are evident. Unlike Poe's idea of 
poetry, which was restricted to beauty, this is substantially restricted to moral 
values: poetry is the rounder-out of all human activities; it is "the breath 
and finer spirit of all knowledge " ; at its best it " will be found to have a power 
of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can." Again 
there is, under this mainly moral view, the implication and assumption that 
there is a perfect "accent" or ideal of poetry which finds its nearest approxi- 
mation in the quotations of the celebrated " touchstones." It is in the light of 
this ideal, of course, that these quoted passages become touchstones. The 
main question of the value of Arnold's essay, aside from its being merely an 
expression of personal opinion, would relate to the substantiation of this ideal, 
of these touchstones, and the minor questions would relate to the testing of 
particular poets according to them. 

Whatever one's findings might be on such a question as this, when applied 
also to other essays of Arnold, — and on this point such critics as Mr. J. M. 
Robertson (Modern Humanists) and Mr. Swinburne (Miscellanies) have 
spoken in no uncertain terms, — there remains the historical question of the 
value of Arnold's criticism with regard to the awakening of interest in litera- 
ture, to the increasing of our knowledge of foreign literature, to the eternally 
necessary plea for greater breadth and catholicity of judgment and taste. 
In these respects, at least, he is an important critic. 

One thing has tended to obscure critical issues, of whatever sort, with 
Arnold. He is the master of a style of great order and lucidity, but of such 
pervasive assumption of superiority and finality of judgment that he either 
immensely attracts or very much repels readers, according to their tempera- 
ment. His constant laying down of the law is very good for the sustaining 
of those who need the sustaining that the law supplies, but it sometimes annoys 
people who themselves prefer to enunciate the dogma, just as such severely 
final criticism finds little acceptance among people of an easier temperament. 
" Moriemini in peccatis vestris, — ye shall die in your sins," if you don't 
believe as I do about morals and style, is hardly fair as a final argument about 
disputed points. 

i. What is the occasion of Arnold's essay? Make an analysis of the 
main points of this essay with a view to showing the text or thesis and the 
illustration. 

2. What does Arnold mean by such phrases as " conceive of poetry worth- 
ily," "the high destinies of poetry," "a criticism of life." (Cf. the essay on 
Wordsworth in Essays in Criticism: Second Series), "the best," "the really 
excellent," a "real estimate," the "historical estimate," "the personal esti- 
mate," " high poetic truth and seriousness," a " classic " and " classi- 
cal," "liquid" and "fluid," "accent," "the real Burns," "laws of poetic 
truth and poetic beauty," "the sound and unsound, or only half sound," 
"the true and untrue, or only half true"? What is implied in all these 
phrases with regard to Arnold's standards of criticism? What is implied in 



NOTES 353 

such a sentence as this (p. 273): "To trace the labour, the attempts, the 
weaknesses, the failures of a genuine classic, to acquaint one's self with his 
time and his life and his historical relationships, is mere literary dilettantism 
unless it has that clear sense and deeper enjoyment for its end?" 

3. What demonstration is there for the implied principles in the foregoing 
quotation, either in history, in common consent, or in ethical and artistic 
theory? To what degree can estimates be other than "personal"? How 
far do Arnold's seem to you to be personal ? Consult his life, with a view to 
seeing how far his temperament and training influenced his judgments and 
was responsible for his taste. On what principle does he choose his tests 
and "touchstones"? In these tests does he recognize different genres of 
literature, or is it clear that the epic and dramatic genres, from which all his 
"touchstones" are taken, were to him the highest type? Compare his say- 
ing, with regard to Burns's bacchanalian poetry (p. 288): "There is some- 
thing in it of bravado, something that makes us feel that we have not the 
man speaking to us in his real voice : something, therefore, poetically un- 
sound." Do Arnold's quotations seem to be predominantly grave ? Why are 
such grave subjects necessarily of the highest quality? Compare Poe on The 
Philosophy of Composition. Is the following a fair equation? "If we are 
thoroughly penetrated by their power, we shall find that we have acquired 
a sense enabling us, whatever poetry may be laid before us, to feel the degree 
in which a high poetical quality is present or wanting there " (p. 277) = If 
we immerse ourselves in one sort of poetry, we shall be immersed in it, and 
shall be impervious to poetry of a different kind. If not fair, why? 

4. Test by your own impressions of Ward's English Poets the truth of 
Arnold's assertions in the paragraph beginning "The idea of tracing historic 
origins," etc. (p. 273). On the face of the lines quoted on p. 275, is it fair to 
say that "we are in another world" ? Are the lines quoted from Dryden and 
Pope, on p. 286, fair examples of the work of those poets ? Compare Arnold's 
use of illustrative quotation in On Translating Homer. 

5. What should you say of the justness and value of many of Arnold's 
cautions, such as, against one's being too much engrossed in the understand- 
ing and analysis of machinery to get the more important ideas? Or this: 
" Moreover the very occupation with an author, and the business of exhibiting 
him, disposes us to affirm and amplify his importance" (p. 274) ? In what 
respects does Arnold's criticism in this essay seem to you to be valuable? 
In what ways defective ? 

6. Analyze the body of Arnold's critical work with a view to showing the 
material, the principles, and the sanctions which he expounded. Compare 
it in these respects with previous and contemporary criticism. 

XIV. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

The Biographia Literaria, from which the present selection is taken, the 
Lectures on Shakespeare (1811), and the Lectures on Literature and Literary 
Subjects (1818) contain what is most valuable of Coleridge's critical ideas. In 
general, in these works Coleridge made an appeal to a body of phenomena 
and used a critical method much in advance of his more dogmatic contem- 
poraries, such as Jeffrey. The main principles on which he based his criti- 
cism were (1) a theory of poetry, deduced, not from authority, but from phi- 
losophy and, what were to him, the facts of language, logic, and psychology 



354 MOTES 

(as he understood these matters) ; (2) a consideration of the actual phenomena 
as represented in the current vogue of an author, a complete, rather than a 
partial, view of an author's production, the purpose of the author as stated or 
revealed in an interpretation of his work, and an analysis of the qualities of 
his style ; and (3) a feeling for what is good in poetry — perhaps his ultimate 
test, and certainly a personal one. 

The present selection well illustrates at least two of these principles. The 
desire to find a definition of poetry and to illustrate that definition by specific 
reference to Shakespeare's poems is habitual and characteristic of Coleridge's 
desire to find a satisfactory definition of poetry, not in verse, or in authority, 
or in history, but in terms of the innate nature of the medium. "Nothing," 
he says (p. 297), " can permanently please which does not contain in itself the 
reason why it is so; and not otherwise." In the illustrations from Venus 
and Adonis of the nature of poetical power, he deals, as it were, with the 
spiritual content of the poems as expressing itself in the sweetness of verse, 
the imagery, etc. The same method of criticism is to be observed in the 
famous enumeration of the characteristic defects and excellencies of Words- 
worth (Biographia Liter aria, XXII.) and the admirable qualities (there are 
no defects) of Shakespeare. Thus, again, using Venus and Adonis (Lectures 
of 1818; Collected Works, Vol. IV. pp. 46-50) as illustration, — this time 
of Shakespeare's consummate power as a poet, — he made him out to be 
possessed of the following characteristics: deep feeling and exquisite sense 
for beauty, entire command of his feelings, impersonality of expression, 
affectionate love for natural objects, fancy, "the indwelling power of the 
imagination," "endless activity of thought," and " a most profound, energetic, 
and philosophic mind." Evidently all these are spiritual categories; they 
are not, like De Quincey's catalogue of Shakespeare's values, matters of ob- 
jective contribution, or, as in Poe, a matter of mechanically harmonious rela- 
tion of parts to a subject of given beauty. 

The other point is clearer. It has to do with the palpable fact of an author's 
vogue. In stating (p. 295) the fact of Wordsworth's popularity, Coleridge 
evidently makes use of an important, and too often neglected, sort of phe- 
nomena. (Cf. Bagehot on Dickens.) His subsequent criticism of Words- 
worth is an attempt to find out why the fact should be so by reason of the 
nature of Wordsworth's poems. 

It has been thought advisable to dwell at this length on the nature of Cole- 
ridge's criticism because his principles have become pervasive of much later 
criticism (cf. Mill: Coleridge in Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. II.). 
Compared with his contemporary Jeffrey, they indicate a wholly different 
tenor of mind and a far more enduring influence. They are alive to-day; 
whereas Jeffrey's method is usually sterile, brilliant though it be. Whether 
Coleridge borrowed his ideas or not need not be elaborated here (cf. J. M. 
Robertson : Coleridge in New Essays toward a Critical Method) ; we are sim- 
ply dealing with the phenomena presented in his prose. Compared with his 
great predecessors he attached more importance to facts of the vogue and pur- 
pose of an author and to philosophy, analysis, and feeling. Thus there is 
with him greater relativity of treatment, a more flexible method, and, though 
he aimed at elaborate and ultimate truth, more impressionism. 

The circumstances of the present selection so well explain themselves that 
little further comment is necessary. Wordsworth's important essay, which 
is the point of departure for Coleridge's criticism in this and the following 



notes 355 

chapters of Biographia Literaria, was prefixed to the second edition of the 
Lyrical Ballads, and should be read. It is to be had in any good edition of 
Wordsworth's complete works. 

i. State Coleridge's fundamental idea of poetry, and show how this is 
borne out in the examination of Venus and Adonis. What are the "two car- 
dinal points " of poetry according to Coleridge ? Compare this idea of poetry 
with that of Poe, Arnold, and Shelley. What is the evidence in favor of it 
and of them ? 

2. Expound any critical principles or bases of judgment that you note in 
Coleridge's work. 

XV. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

The justly celebrated Defence of Poetry was originally written, as its title 
suggests, in a polemic vein, as an answer to Peacock's The Four Ages of 
Poetry. In its published form, much of the controversial matter was cast 
out, and only one or two indications remain of its controversial nature. The 
essay as it stands is among the most eloquent expositions that exist of the ideal 
nature and essential value of poetry. Its chief distinction lies in the sincerity 
and enthusiasm of the author. 

Like several other essays in this volume, as those of Bagehot and Pater, 
it is based on one of those fundamental distinctions — here that between 
reason and imagination — which Coleridge so frequently expounded, and 
which here serves as a point of departure. There are two main parts: (i) 
the nature of poetry, as something connate with man, and poetical expres- 
sion; and (2) the effect of poetry upon mankind. This latter part, though 
even more eloquent than the former, is more rambling. The critical question 
at issue in both is a very fundamental one, and is practically the same as that 
which has been debated for many years between two opposed schools of ethics 
and philosophy, the intuitional and the utilitarian, and is to-day rife betwixt 
rationalists and pragmatists. Of the truth of Shelley's main thesis there is 
occasion for much discussion, but of his own vigour and sincerity there can 
be no question. 

1. State Shelley's thesis in this essay. Show in detail the topics which he 
treats. What is his criterion of the worth of various poets whom he mentions ? 
What is his criterion for the determining good and bad poetry? What does 
he mean by such terms as "reason," "imagination," "taste," "the inde- 
structible order," "universal," "wit and humour," "a story," "utility," 
"a single condition of epic truth," "the poet," "poetry" in its broad and 
in its restricted sense ? What are the reasons for the superiority of poetry in 
its restricted sense over other forms of art ? Why is Lear to be preferred to 
Agamemnon or (Edipus Tyr annus ? Why were choruses in Greek drama of 
great poetical importance ? 

2. What are the sanctions for Shelley's view of the idea and value of 
poetry ? How is his generalization supported ? 

3. Compare Shelley's idea of poetry, his method and his proofs, with those 
of Poe, Arnold, and Coleridge. 



356 NOTES 



List of Books referred to in the Introduction and the Notes. 

Alden, R. M. English Verse. New York. 1903. 

Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. New York. 1883. 

Essays in Criticism, Second Series. London and New York. 1888. 
On Translating Homer. New York. 1883. 
Bagehot, Walter. Literary Studies. 2 vols. London and New York. 

1891. 
Benson, A. C. Walter Pater. In the English Men of Letters. London 

and New York. 1906. 
Besant, Walter. The Art of Fiction. Boston. 1884. 
Brewster, W. T. Representative Essays on the Theory of Style. New 
York. 1905. 
Specimens of Narration. New York. 1895. 
Studies in Structure and Style. New York. 1896. 
Brunetiere, F. devolution des genres dans Vhistoire de la litterature. 

Paris. 1890. 
Carpenter, G. R. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In the Beacon 
Biographies. Boston. 1901. 
Modern English Prose (with W. T. Brewster). New York. 1904. 
Chesterton, G. K. Robert Browning. In the English Men of Letters. 
London. 1903. 
Charles Dickens, a Critical Study. New York. 1906. 
Heretics. New York. 1905. 
Varied Types. New York. 1905. 
Coleridge, S. T. Complete Works. 7 vols. New York. 1853. Vol. 
III., Biographia Liter aria. Vol. IV., Lectures on Shakespeare. 
Collins, J. C. Ephemera Critica. New York. 1902. 

Jonathan Swift. London. 1893. 
Courthope, W. J. Life in Poetry, Law in Taste. 2 vols. London. 

1901. 
Craik, H. The Life of Jonathan Swift. London. 1882. 
Cross, W. L. The Development of the English Novel. New York. 

1899. 
De Quincey, T. Collected Works, ed. by David Masson. 14 vols. 
1889, 1890. Vol. II., Literary Reminiscences. Vol. IV., Shake- 
speare. 
Dryden, see Ker. 

Erskine, J. The Elizabethan Lyric. New York. 1904. 
Forster, J. The Life of Jonathan Swift. London. 1875. 
Gates, L. E. Selections from the Essays of Francis Jeffrey. Boston. 

1894. 
Gayley, C. M., and Scott, F. N. An Introduction to the Materials and 
Methods of Literary Criticism. Vol. I. Boston.. 1897. 



notes 357 

Gummere, F. B. A Handbook of Poetics for Students of English Verse. 

Boston. 1885. 
Harrison, Frederic. Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other Literary Esti- 
mates. New York. 1900. 
Hazlitt, W. See Waller. 

Hennequin, E. La Critique scientifique. Paris. 1888. 
Howells, W. D. Criticism and Fiction. New York. 1891. 
James, H. Partial Portraits. London and New York. 1888. 
James, W. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York. 1902. 
Jeffrey, F. See Gates. 

Johnson, S. The Lives of the Poets, ed. by G. B. Hill. 3 vols. Ox- 
ford. 1905. 
Ker, W. P. The Essays of John Dryden. 2 vols. Oxford. 1900. 
Lamb, C. The Poems, Plays, and Miscellaneous Essays of Charles 

Lamb, in Collected Works, ed. by Alfred Ainger. 6 vols. New 

York. 1885. 
Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of 

Shakespeare. London. 1901. (Bohn.) 
Lamont, H. English Composition. New York. 1906. 
Lee, S. A Life of William Shakespeare. New York and London. 

1898. 
Lounsbury, T. R. Studies in Chaucer. 3 vols. New York. 1892. 
The Text of Shakespeare. Vol. III. of Shakespearian Wars. New 

York. 1901-1906. 
Lowell ; J. R. The Writings of — . 10 vols. Boston. 1892. Vol. IV., 

Wordsworth, Dante. 
Mackail, J. W. The Life of William Morris. 2 vols. London. 1899. 
Maitland, F. W. The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. London. 1906. 
Masson, D. De Quincey. In the English Men of Letters. London. 

1881. See also De Quincey. 
Morley, J. Miscellanies. 3 vols. London. 1886. 
Studies in Literature. London. 189 1. 
(Editor). English Men of Letters. 
Nichol, J. Carlyle. In the English Men of Letters. 
Pater, W. Appreciations, with an Essay on Style. London and New 

York. 1890. 
The Renaissance. London and New York. 1890. 
Payne, W. M. American Literary Criticism. New York and London. 

1904. 
Peacock, T. L. The Four Ages of Poetry. Appendix. Vol. VII. of the 

complete works of Shelley (whom see). 
Perry, B. A Study of Prose Fiction. Boston. 1903. 
Poe, E. A. The Fall of the House of Usher, and Other Tales and Prose 

Writings of Edgar Poe. Ed. by Ernest Rhys. London. 
The Poetic Principle. The Philosophy of Composition. 



358 NOTES 

Ringwalt, R. C. Modern American Oratory. New York. 1898. 

Robertson, E. S. (editor). Great Writers Series. 

Robertson, F. W. Lectures and Addresses on Literary and Social 

Topics. Boston. 1859. 
Robertson, J. M. Essays towards a Critical Method. London. 1889. 
New Essays towards a Critical Method. London and New York. 
1897. 
Modern Humanists, Sociological Studies of Carlyle, Mill, Emerson, 
Arnold, Ruskin, and Spencer. London. 1891. 
Rossetti, M. F. A Shadow of Dante. 
Ruskin, J. Modern Painters. 5 vols. New York, n. d. Vol. III., 

Chapter XII., The Pathetic Fallacy. 
Saintsbury, G. A History of Criticism and Literary Taste, in Europe. 
3 vols. New York, Edinburgh, and London. 1900-1904. 
Loci Critici. Boston and London. 1903. 
Scott, W. Memoirs of Jonathan Swift, D.D. Vol. I. of the Works of 

Swift. 19 vols. 2d ed. Edinburgh 1824. 
Shaw, G. B. Introductions to: — 

Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. 2 vols. Chicago and New York. 

1898. 
Three Plays for Puritans. Chicago and New York. 1901. 
Man and Superman. New York. 1904. 
The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Boston. 1891. 
The Perfect Wagner ite. Chicago. 1899. 
Shelley, P. B. Works in Prose and Verse. Ed. by H. B. Forman. 

8 vols. London. 1880. 
Stephen, L. Hours in a Library. 3 vols. London and New York. 
1894. 
Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift, in the Eng- 
lish Men of Letters. 
Studies of a Biographer. 4 vols. New York. 1898-1902. 
The Dictionary of National Biography (with Sidney Lee) . London. 
1885-1900. 
Stevenson, R. L. Memories and Portraits. New York. 1894. - A 
Humble Remonstrance. 
On Style in Literature : Its Technical Elements. Contemporary 
Review: Vol. XL VII. p. 548. (April. 1885). 
Swinburne, A. C. Miscellanies. London. 1886. . . 
Tolstoy, Count L. F. What is Art ? Translated by Aylmer Maude. 

New York, n. d. 
Trent, W. P. The Authority of Criticism and Other Essays. New 
York. 1899. 

Greatness in Literature, and Other Papers. New York. 1905. 
Trevelyan, G. O. The Life and Letters of Macaulay. 2 vols. New 
York. 1876. 



notes 359 

Vaughan, C. E. English Literary Criticism. London. 1903. 
Waller, A. R., and Glover, A. The Collected Works of William Hazlitt. 

12 vols. London and New York. 1902- 1904. Vol. IV., 

The Spirit of the Age. 
Ward, T. H. The English Poets. 4 vols. 3d ed. London. 1885. 
Winchester, C. T. Some Principles of Literary Criticism. New York. 

1899. 
Woodberry, G. E. The Makers of Literature. New York. 1900. 
Wordsworth, W. The Complete Poetical Works of, with an introduction 

by John Morley. New York and London. 1889. Essays in 

the appendix. 



INDEX 



In this index proper names appear in small capitals, titles in italics, and topics (including 
fictitious characters) in small type. 



Absalom and Achitophel, 200. 

Academy, 136. 

Accent, Quantity, and Feet, 164. 

Accius, 321. 

Account of the Williams Murders, 17, 
18. 

Achilles, 186, 234, 276, 314. 

Acting, Elocution in, 223-225, fashion 
for acting Shakespeare, 221, identi- 
fication of actors and parts, 221-222, 
impossibility of acting Lear, 231-232, 
its deadening effect, 222-223, scenes 
suitable to, 223, tendency to level 
distinctions, 228-229, vulgar esti- 
mates of, 229. 

Actor, see Acting. 

Addison, xxvii, xxxii, 31, 284, 287, 318, 

345- 
Adonis, 302. 
Adorni, 37. 
Mlius Lamia, 17. 
^Eneas, 185, 186. 
JEneid, 185, 198, 326. 
AESCHYLUS, 22, 310. 
^Esop, 61. 

Agamemnon, 317, 355. 
Ajax, 181. 
Al Aaraaf, 141. 
Alcibiades, 21. 
Alden, 346, 356. 
Alexander, the Great, 21, 22. 
Alexander Pope, quoted, 32-33; 25, 31; 

(Stephen's), 338, 358. 
Alexis, 297. 
Allan, 128, 129, 130. 
Allen, Benjamin, 95. 
Allen, George, 218. 
Alliteration, 209. 
American humor, 164-165. 
American Literary Criticism, vi, 357. 



Anacreon, 23, 48, 297. 

Analects from Richter, 25. 

Analysis of composition, 258-259. 

Analysis of the Raven, 260-268. 

Anaxagoras, 22. 

Ancient Mariner, xxviii, 295. 

Anecdotage, 17. 

Annabel Lee, 151, 351. 

Annus Mirabilis, 345. 

Antigone of Sophocles, 25, 31. 

Apollonius Rhodius, 326. 

Appelles, 22. 

Appian, 23. 

Appreciations, in, 343, 357. 

Appreciative criticism, xix. 

Arachne and Pallas, 4. 

Archer, xxvii. 

Arcite, 189, 199. 

Ariosto, 61, 302, 325. 

Aristophanes, quoted, 304; 22, 200, 
291. 

Aristotle, on seriousness, 278; xii, 
xiv, xix, 22, 45, 198, 283, 344. 

Arnold, definition of criticism, x; On 
the study of poetry, 269-293 : 
classics, true and false, 272-273, 282- 
284, fallacies in the estimating of 
poetry, 271-275, importance of 
poetry, 269-270, methods of study, 
273-275, need of high standards, 
270-271, seriousness in, 278; sur- 
vey of English poetry, 279-293, 
"touchstones," 275-278; 

Notes on Arnold, 351-353; 
Quoted, x, 269, 345, 352, 353; 
ix, xi, xviii, xix, xx, xxii, xxiii, 
xxv, xxix, xxxii, 83, 113, 141, 147, 
164, 166, 167, 340, 341, 342, 343. 
355, 356. 

Art in fiction, 240-241. 



361 



362 



INDEX 



Art of Conversation, 25. 

Art 0} Fiction, 237-256, 350, 356. 

Art Singing and Heart Singing, 171. 

"Artemus Ward," x. 

Artful Dodger, 91, 100. 

Arthur Gordon Pym, 159. 

Arthur Gordon Pym, 160. 

Arthurs, 200. 

Assonance, 209. 

Atheist, 69. 

Augustus, 61, 191. 

Auld Lang Syne, 291. 

Austen, 256. 

Authority of Criticism, xiv, 358. 

Autobiographic Sketches, 16, 17, 34. 

Autos, 317. 

Avenger, 34, 35- 

Bacon, 16, 22, 32, 57, 163, 309, 312, 

3 2 9, 333- 

Bagehot, review of the collected works 
of Dickens, 80-110; notes on, 341- 
342; quoted, 342; xvii, xx, xxiii, 
xxxi, 176, 343, 354, 355, 356- 

Bajazet, 223. 

Balfour, 176. 

Balzac, 160. 

Banks, 225. 

Barnaby Rudge, quoted, 85-86; 102, 
156, 169, 170, 257. 

Barnwell, 93, 225, 226, 230. 

"Barry Cornwall," xxxi. 

Bartholomew Fair, 189. 

Bates, Charley, 91, 100. 

Bathyllus, 297. 

Baucis, 188. 

Baucis and Philemon, 181. 

Baudelaire, 139, 140, 141, 143. 

Bavtus, 335. 

Beacon Biographies, 338. 

Beatrice, 123, 276, 324. 

Beauty, 260-261. 

Beethoven, 150, 152, 217. 

Behn, 66. 

Beleaguered City, 146. 

Bells, 142, 144, 344. 

Belvidera, 228. 

Benson, xvi, 356. 

Berenice, 139, 159, 178. 

Berkeley, 14, 15, 175, 207, 337. 

Bernard, 172. 



I Besant, Lecture on the art cf fiction, 
237: his frankness, 238, idea of fic- 
tion as a fine art, 240-241, on moral- 
ity in fiction, 254-255, on selection, 
250-251, on the " story," 151-154; 
wrong view of "laws," 244-245, 
and distinctions, 246-249; 

Quoted, 243-244, 251 ; 350,351,356. 

Betterton, 223. 

bettes worth, ii. 

Beverley, Mrs., 228. 

Bible, 210. 

Biographia Literaria, 294, 343, 353, 354, 
355, 356. 

Biographical criticism, xv. 

Birrell, xxvii, 134. 

Black Cat, 158, 160. 

Blackmore, 66, 199, 201, 344. 

Blackwood's Magazine, 34, 167. 

Blithedale, 248. 

Boccaccio, compared with Chaucer, 
183,197-198; influence on the Italian 
tongue, 183; 187, 191, 194, 198, 199, 
3 2 7, 329, 345- 

BOILEAU, 62. 
BOLINGBROKE, I, II, 12. 

Borough, 73. 

BOSSUET, 206. 
BOSWELL, XXX. 

Brahmin, story of the, 60-61. 

Brewster, Sir David, 158. 

Brewster, W. T., xxxi, 350, 356. 

Bride of Abydos, 290. 

Broadway Journal, 131, 169, 171. 

Brown, 131, 228, 234. 

Browne, Sir T., xxviii, 207, 210. 

Browne, W. H., 161, 162, 163, 164, 172, 
176. 

Browning, E. B., 142, 143, 147, 168. 

Browning, R., xvii, 150, 351. 

Brunetiere, 339, 356. 

Brunetto Latini, 279. . 

Burke, 210. 

Burnet, 299. 

Burns, admirers of, 288^290, great 
achievements of, 291, place in Eng- 
lish literature, 287, "real" Burns, 
287-288, shortcomings, 288-290, 
particularly his lack of "high serious- 
ness," 290; quoted, 287, 288, 289, 290, 
291, 292; 280, 352. 



INDEX 



363 



Burton, 165, 166. 
Butler, 341. 

Byron, quoted, 69; ix, 69, 77, 109, 209, 
214, 215, 290, 292. 

C^DMON, 274. 
CAESAR, 19, 24. 

Ccesars, 16, 17, 19. 

Calderon, 317, 325, 329. 

Caleb Williams, 257. 

California, 25. 

Calista, 228. 

Callimachus, 23. 

Calypso, 185. 

Camillus, 321. 

Campbell, quoted, 70; 74. 

Canon, The, 191. 

Canterbury Tales, 84, 182, 188, 191, 192, 
194, 280. 

Caricature, 99-100. 

Carlyle, vi, xxvii, 104, 133, 134, 136, 
137, 167, 206, 340, 344. 

Carlyle, 339, 344, 357- 

Caroline, Queen, ix. 

Carpenter, xxxi, 338, 356. 

Carpenter's young wife, 194. 

Carteret, 8, 9. 

Cary, 77. 

Case of Monsieur Valdemar, 139. 

Cask of Amontillado, 159. 

Cassio, 74. 

Casuistry, 25, 26. 

Casuistry of Roman Meals, 17, 23, 24. 

Catholic Reasons for Repealing the Test, 
2. 

Cato, 318. 

Catullus, quoted, 190; 321. 

Ceylon, 17. 

Chanson de Roland, quoted, 275; 274. 

Chapman, 285. 

Charlemagne, 274, 275. 

Charlemagne, 17. 

Charles II., 319. 

Charles Dickens, a Critical Study, 350, 
356. 

Charles Lamb, 17, 18. 

Chartism, 104. 

Chateaubriand, 113. 

Chaucer, charm of, 281-282, as clas- 
sic, 282-283, compared with Boc- 
caccio, 183, 197-198, with Ovid, 187- 



189, effect on English, 183, in English 
poetry, 189, genius, 192, good 
sense, 189-190, lack of "high seri- 
ousness," 285, language, 194-197, 
life and opinions, 1 91-192, liquid- 
ness, 282, morals, 193-19 , need 
of a translation of, 196-197, natural- 
ness, 190, originality, 197, Palamon 
and Arcite, his best work, 198-199, 
seventeenth-century view of, 284, 
superiority to the romance poets, 
280, variety, 193; verse, 190; quoted, 
194, 195, 281, 282; xxv, 22, 84, 137, 

3 2 7, 329, 344, 345- 
Cheeryble, 88. 
Ch'erie, 253. 

Chesterton, xiii, xix, xxvii, 349, 356. 
China, 17. 
Christabel, 295. 
Christian of Troyes, quoted, 279; 

280. 
"Christopher North," 167. 
Church, xxvii. 
Chuzzlewit, Jonas, 90. 
Cibber, 229. 

Cicero, xii, 186, 312, see Tully. 
Cicero, 16, 17, 23, 24. 
Cinyras and Myrrha, 181. 
Clarissa, 223. 
Classic, xxiv. 

Classic poetry, 272-274, 282. 
Classification of literature, xxxii, 338, 

34i. 
Claudian, 326. 
Claverhouse, 1. 
Clemm, Mrs., 130, 136, 137. 
Clemm, Virginia, 130. 
Cleveland, quoted, 52, 54; 48. 
Cock and the Fox, 188. 
Coleman, 177. 
Coleridge, 354. 
Coleridge, H., 341. 
Coleridge, S. T., On Poetry and the 

Poetic Power, 294-306 (see Poetry); 

notes on, 353~355; quoted, 351; 

ix, xii, xvi, xix, xxv, xxxi, 17, 21, 29, 

77, 148, 209, 210, 284, 343, 346, 349, 

35°, 355, 356. 
Coleridge, 354. 

Coleridge and Opium-Eating, 17. 
Coleridge's Complete Works, 354, 356. 



3<H 



INDEX 



Collective criticism, xv-xvi. 

Collier, 200, 201, 344. 

Collins, quoted, ix; xxvii, 338, 356. 

Colloquy of Monos and Una, 171. 

Colvin, xxvii. 

Composition, James on, 240-245; 

Poe on, 257-268. 
Comte, 138. 
Conceits, 47. 
Confessions of an English Opium- 

Eater, 16, 17, 34, 39, 40. 
Confessions of a Young Man, 152. 
Congreve, 62. 
Consonance, 209-213. 

CONSTANTINE, 29. 

Constructive criticism, xxi. 
Conversatim of Eiros and Charmian, 

171. 
Cook, the, 193. 
Cooper, 168. 
Cordelia, 231. 

CORNilLLE, xii. 

Costume, effect on the acting of Shake- 
speare, 23 -236. 

Cotter's Saturday Night, 288. 

Courthorpe, xiv, xxvii, 356. 

Cowley, quoted, 48-58 passim; 3, 
45, 194, 19S, i9 6 . 28 4, 339- 

COWPER, 138. 

Coxe, 6. 
Crabbe, 73. 
Craftsman, 12. 
Craik, 338, 356. 

Criticism (see, chiefly, Literary Criti- 
cism), classification of, xv. 
Criticism and Fiction, x, 351, 3 7.. 
Cromwell, 138. 
Cross, 339, 351, 356. 
Cruikshank, 80. 
Custom of the Country, 201. 
Cuvier, 138. 

Daffodils, 122. 

Dame Quickly, 228. 

Dante, his loftiness, 282-283, 2 9°'» 
quoted, 72, 276, 282, 290, 324; xii, 
xvii, xxxi, 72, 136, 137, 203, 279, 310, 
313, 324, 325, 326, 327, 329. 

Dante, Cary's trans., 77. 

Dante, Lowell's, xvii, 357. 

Daphne, 195. 



Dark Ladie, 295. 

Daughter of Lebanon, 34, 40. 

David, 322. 

Davies, Sir John, quoted, 300. 

Death, a Voyage, 54. 

Death of Mr. Mill, 124. 

Decameron, 187. 

Defence of Philosophic Doubt, 176. 

Defence of Poetry, 307-336, 355. 

Defoe, 154, 207, 210. 

Degeneresence, 172. 

Delany, 14. 

Demosthenes, 10, 22, 186. 

Denham, 48, 190. 

Dennis, 102. 

De Quincey, review of his work, 16-44: 
as critic, 31-32, historian, 18, 19, 
humorist, 34-35, imaginative stylist, 
38-44, "impassioned" prose, in- 
tellectual quality, 39, as novelist, 
35-38, originality, 23-24, politics, 
30-31, as portrayer of contemporary 
life, 17-18, student of economics, 
31, his sublimity, 34-35, theology, 
26-29, works, — classification of, 16- 
44, his own classification, 16; princi- 
ples of classification, 1 6-1 7, — classes : 
descriptive, biographical, and his- 
torical writings, 17-24, imaginative, 
33-44, speculative, didactic, and 
critical, 24-33. 

Notes on, 338-339; 
Quoted, 19-23, 28-29, 3 2 -33» 
42-44, 156, 349; 

vi, xxvii, xxxi, xxxii, 156, 210, 
343, 344, 354, 356- 

De Quincey' s Collected Works, 16, 21, 23, 
33, 356. 

De Qiincey's Writings: Classification 
and Review, 16-44. 

Descent into the Maelstrom, 139, 160. 

Desdemona, 228, 232. 

Destructive criticism, xx. 

Development of the English Novel, 339, 

35i, 356. 
Dialogues of Three Templars on Political 

Economy, 25, 30. 
Diana, 195. 
Dice, 35. 
Dickens, review of collected works by 

Bagehot, 80-110: falling off of his 



INDEX 



365 



later work, 105-106, 109-110, his 
humor, 94-99, as illustration of the 
"unsymmetrical" genius, 84-110, 
in manner, 85-86, in matter, 86-87, 
inability to give unity to stories, 87- 
88, to make a love story, 1 00-101, 
to make a plot, 99-100, to reflect, 87, 
his individuality, 107-109, knowl- 
edge, 88-91, politics and philosophy, 
103-105, popularity, 80-91, power 
of improving scenes, 91-94, of ob- 
servation, 88-89, purity, 101-102; 
his sentiment, 102-103, taste, 106- 
107; unmorality of some of his crea- 
tions, 95-99; 

Notes on, 341-342; 
Quoted, 80, 85-86, 89-90, 92-94, 
96; 

136, 160, 167, 168, 170, 237, 
? 56, 257, 354. 

Dickens, 80-110. 

Dictionary of National Biography, 338, 
358. 

Dido, 185. 

Dilke, 167. 

Dion Cassius, 23. 

Dioneo, 198, 199. 

Dionysius, xii. 

Dissertations and Discussions, 354. 

Divina Commedia, xvii, 324, 326. 

Dr. Parr, or Whiggism in its Relation to 
Literature, quoted, 19-21; 17, 18. 

Dodson, 96. 

Donne, quoted, 49, 51-59 passim; 46, 
48, 339- 

Don Quixote, 244. 

Drapier's Letters, 4-12, 15; see Swift. 

Dream upon the Universe, 39. 

Dream-Fugue, 41. 

Dreaming, 24. 

Dreamland, quoted, 147, 148. 

Dryden, Preface to the Fables, 181- 
201, apology for his writings, 199-201, 
on Boccaccio, 197, Chaucer, 189-196, 
— largeness, 192-194, naturalness, 
190-192, originality, 197, reasons for 
translating him, 194-196, his verse, 
190, 195-196, — comparison of Chau- 
cer and Boccaccio, 182-184, 187-188, 
193-194, 197, of Chaucer and Ovid, 
187-189, of Virgil and Homer, 185- 



187, on epic poetry, 186, occasion of 
translation, 181-184, purpose of trans- 
lation, 184, views on translation, 181- 
182 ; Arnold on Dryden as poet, 284- 
286, as prose-writer, 285, Macaulay's 
opinion of the Fables, 62. 
Notes on, 344~345- 
Quoted, 280, 286. 
vi, xii, xxv, 45, 58, 62, 68, 234, 
281, 35°, 353. 356. 
Dumas, 256. 
Duncan, 230. 
Duncan Gray, 287, 291. 

Early Memorials of Grasmere, $$, 34. 

Earthly Paradise, xiv. 

Ecrivains Francises, 159, 170. 

Edgar Allan Poe, 137. 

Edgar Poe and His Critics, 127,128, 135. 

Edward III., 191. 

Effect in composition, 258. 

El Dorado, 151. 

Elements of Drawing, 206. 

Elements of epic poetry, 186. 

Elements of literary criticism, xviii. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 182. 

Elizabethan Lyric, 339, 356. 

Elocution, 223-225. 

Emerson, xviii, xxv, 340. 

Emilia, 189. 

Emma, xxx. 

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 179. 

Enfield Speakers, 222. 

English Composition, xxviii, 357. 

English in Ireland, 10. 

English Literary Criticism, vi, 359. 

English Mail Coach, 34, 40-41, 338. 

English Men of Letters, 338, 339, 356, 357. 

English Poets, 269, 353, 359. 

English Verse, 346, 356. 

Ennius, 188, 190, 321. 

Ephemera Critica, ix, 356. 

Epistle Dedicatory to the Rival Ladies, 

345- 
Epitaph, quoted, 220. 
Erskine, 339, 356. 
Essay on Death, 312. 
Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 345. 
Essays in Criticism, x, 356. 
Essays in Criticism, second series, ix, 

26 9> 34i, 343. 352, 35 6 - 



3 66 



INDEX 



Essays of John Dryden, 344, 357. 

Essays of Shelley, 307. 

Essays towards a Critical Method, 344, 

358. 
Essenes, 16, 17, 23, 24. 
Ethics, 205. 
Euganean Hills, 212. 
Euphrasia, 228. 

Eureka, 140, 161, 162, 170, 175. 
Euripides, 22, 316. 
Evans, 236. 

Eve of St. Agnes, xxviii, 114. 
Examiner, 6. 
Excursion, 115, 343. 

Fable for Critics, 160, 178. 

Fables, 62, 344. 

Fairfax, 182, 190. 

Fairy Queen, 326. 

Fall of the House of Usher, 139, 159, 
162. 

Fall of the House of Usher and Other 
Tales and Prose Writings, 357. 

Fallacies in the estimate of poetry, 
271-275. 

Falsification of English History, 25, 30. 

Falstaff, 96, 97, 236, 342. 

Fancy, 11 1. 

Farewell to Nancy, 290. 

Fatal Marksman, 35. 

Faust, 291. 

Ferdinand, 234. 

Fiametta, 198, 199. 

Fiction, naturalism in, 157-158; quali- 
ties of enduring, 157; realism in, 158- 
161 (see James, Henry). 

Field, xxxi. 

Fifty Suggestions, 171. 

Ftlium Labyrinthi, 312. 

Flaubert, 249, 256. 

Fletcher, 201. 

For Annie, 151. 

For a' that, and a' that, 288. 

Fors Clavigera, 206, 218. 

FORSTER, 338, 356. 

Fortnightly Review, 111, 124. 

Fouque, 168. 

Four Ages of Poetry, 307, 355, 357. 

Franklin, xxx. 

Eraser, 167. 

French and English Manners, 17. 



French Poets and Novelists, 141. 
Friar, 191. 
Froude, 10. 
Fuller, 165. 

Gabriel, 78. 

Gainsborough, 114. 

Galeotto, 324. 

Gamester, 228. 

Gamp, Mrs., 91, 102, 108. 

Garrick, 220, 224, 228, 229, 231. 

Gates, 340, 356. 

Gautier, 113, 153. 

Gayley, vi, 356, 350. 

Genesis of the Raven, 144. 

Genius, classification of men of, 81-84. 

Genre criticism, xvi— xvii, 339. 

George Eliot, xxvii, xxviii, xxxii, 

xxxiii, 160, 165, 254. 
George Sand, 118. 
George I., 12. 
George II., n. 
Gertrude, 236. 
Gerusalemme Liberata, 326. 
Gibbon, 210, 240, 329. 
Gilfillan, 127, 134, 136. 
Gill, 131, 140, 141. 
Glance at the Works of Mackintosh, 25. 
Glenalvon, 230. 
Globe, 64. 

Glory of Motion, 40, 41. 
Glover, 359. 
Godfrey of Bulloign, 182. 
Godwin, 257. 

Goethe, x, 18, 137, 153, 291. 
Goethe, 17, 18. 
Goethe Reflected in his Novel of Wilhelm 

Meister, 25. 
Gold Bug, 139, 172. 
Goldsmith, 207. 
De Goncourt, 253. 
Good Parson, the, 191, 192. 
Gordon, 85, 86. 
Gosse, xxvii. 
Gower, 190. 
Graham, 130. 
Graham's Magazine, 156. 
Gray, 75, 286, 287. 
Greatness in Literature, 358. . 
Great Writers, 338, 357. 
Greece wider the Romans, 17. 



INDEX 



367 



Greek Literature, classification of, 21- 

*3- 
Green, 34. 
Gresset, 162. 
Grimm, 209. 
Griswold, quoted, 139; xxvi, 127, 130, 

136, 139, 140, 141, 146, 147, 177. 
Grizild, 187. 
Gulliver's Travels, 154, 338. 

GUMMERE, 346, 357. 

Gustavus-Adolphus, 36. 

Hack work, bad effect of, 168, 169. 

Halifax, 62. 

Hallam, 83. 

Hallowe'en, 288. 

Hamilton, 163. 

Hamlet, popularity with actors, 223- 
225, ruined by acting, 224, vul- 
garized by actors, 226-228; 97, 221, 
236, 276, 349. 

Hamlet, xvii, 222. 

Hampden, 6. 

Handbook of Poetics, 346, 357. 

Hannibal, 322. 

Hans Pfaall, 139, 155, 156. 

Happy Life of a Parish Priest, 39. 

Harbours of England, 213, 215. 

Harley, 1, 63. 

Harper's Magazine, 177. 

Harrington, 190. 

Harrison, on Ruskin as a Master of 
Prose, 202-219 (see Ruskin); notes 
on, 345-348; quoted, 348; xvii, xx, 

357- 

Haunted Palace, 145, 146. 
Hawthorne, xviii, 136, 158, 167, 169, 

248. 
Hawthorne, 136, 146, 166. 
Hawtrey, translation quoted, 275. 
Hazlitt, quoted, 346-347; vi, xx, 

xxvii, 343, 348, 349. 35°, 35 7 5 

Collected Works of, 359. 
Hector, 185, 314. 
Hegel, 175. 
Helen, 276. 
Hemans, xxxi. 
Hennequin, xvi, 159, 168, 170, 179, 

357- 
Henry IV., 191. 
Henry IV., 276. 



Henry V., 222. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 338, 356. 

Herder, 17, 18. 

Heretics, xiii, 350, 356. 

d'HERiCAULT, quoted, 272. 

Herodotus, 22, 313. 

Heroic Plays, 345. 

Herschel, 155. 

Hesiod, 23. 

Hill, 228. 

Historic estimate, 271-275. 

Historico-Critical Inquiry into the 

Origin of the Rosicrucians and 

Freemasons, 17. 
History of Criticism, xii, 350, 358. 
History of the Eighteenth Century, 10. 
Hobbes, 27, 182, 185. 
Hodgson, 31. 
Holkerstein, 36. 
Holmes, xxxi, 141. 
Holy Fair, 288. 
Homer, compared with Virgil, 185- 

187; quoted, 275, 276; 23, 189, 215, 

276, 285, 314, 315, 316, 320, 326, 333, 

345- 
Homer and the Homeridce, 17. 
Hood, 167. 
Hop Frog, 177. 
Horace, quoted, 184, 196; 61, 145, 

162, 164, 187, 189, 190, 191, 200, 

321, 333, 345- 
Horatio, 276. 
Horne, 168. 

Hours in a Library, 338, 343, 358. 
House Beautiful, 123. 
Howard, n, 12. 
Ho wells, quoted, x; xi, xx, 154, 351, 

357- 
Hugo, 113, 118. 

Humble Remonstrance, 350, 358. 
Hume, 27, 206, 207, 329. 
Humour, 164-165. 
Hunt, xxvii. 
Hunting the Boar, 181. 
Huysmans, 152. 

Iago, 165, 166, 230. 
Idea of a Universal History on a Cos- 
mopolitan Plan, 24, 26. 
Idiot Boy, 161. 
Idol of the Theatre, 163. 



368 



INDEX 



Idylls of the King, 161. 

Iliad, 62, 163, 181, 185, 198, 275, 276. 

Imagery in Shakespeare's poetry, 302- 

3°5- 
Imagination, in; compared with 

fancy, in; with reason, 307. 
Imitation, quoted, 274. 
Imogen, 228. 
Imp of the Perverse, 160. 
Impressionism, xviii-xix, 342-343. 
Incognito, or Count Fitzhum, 35. 
Inductive criticism, xx. 
Inferno, 72, 276. 
Ingram, quoted, 130, 136; 131, 135, 

136, 138, 146, 160, 161, 169, 173, 175, 

177. 
In Memoriam, 209. 
Interpretation of literature, xvii-xviii. 
Introduction to the Literature of Europe, 

83. 
Introduction to the Materials and 

Methods of Literary Criticism, vi, 350, 

356. 
Irish Coinage, 5. 
Isabella, 228. 
Isaiah, 322. 
Isaiah, 299. 
Island of Sleep, 147. 
Isocrates, 23. 

James, Henry, on The Art of Fiction, 
237-256: Besant's view of the novel, 
J 37> J 3 8 > definition of the novel, 
242-243, fiction essentially serious, 
238-240, a fine art, 240-241, futility 
of "laws" and distinctions, 243-249, 
lack of theory in English fiction, 237- 
238, morality in fiction, 254-255, 
need for freedom, 242, 256, popular 
view of fiction, 241, purpose in fic- 
tion, 255, "romance" and "novel," 
248-249, the "story," 251-254, 
ultimate test of, 249-251, vulgariza- 
tion of fiction, 242; 
Notes on, 35Q-35 1 ; 
Quoted, 141, 153, 351; 
136, 141, 144, 146, 153, 154, 166, 
167, 357- 

James, William, xii, 357. 

Jeffrey, xix, xx, xxvii, 31, 340, 343, 
354, 357- 



Jesus, 322, 323. 

Jevons, 176. 

Jingle, Alfred, 104. 

Joan of Arc, 34, 35, 40. 

Job, 77, 310, 322. 

John Keats, 25. 

John of Gaunt, 191. 

John Paul Frederick Richter, 25. 

Johnson, Esther, 12 {see Stella). 

Johnson, Samuel, on The Metaphysi- 
cal Poets, 45-59: characterization of 
the genre, 45-48, illustrated, 48-59; 
Notes on, 339-340; 
Quoted, 339, 340; 
vi, xvi, xxiii, xxv, 19, 20, 31, 62, 
137, 281, 284, 345, 350, 357. 

Jolly Beggars, 291. 

Jonson, xxvii, 48, 226, 345. 

Josephus, 24. 

Journal of Julius Rodman, 160. 

Judas, 24. 

Judas Iscariot, 17, 23, 24. 

Judicial Criticism, xix-xx. 

Juggernaut of Social Life, 25. 

Julian, 23. 

Juliet, 223, 228, 349. 

Julius Cassar, 19. 

Juvenal, 200. 

Kames, xix. 

Kant, 24, 25, 26, 175. 

Kant in his Miscellaneous Essays, 24. 

Keats, ix, xxviii, xxxii, 114, 138, 144, 

216, 281, 282. 
Kemble, 221, 230. 
Kendal, 6, 10 
Ker, 344, 345, 357- 
King Arthur, 200. 
King Lear, 317. 
King of Hayti, 35. 

Klosterheim, summarized, 36-38; 338. 
Knight, 113. 
Knowledge, quoted, 48. 

La Belle Heaulmiere, 283. 

La Critique Scientifique, xvi, 357. 

Lady Geraldine's Courtship, 142. 

Lady of SJialott, 161. 

Lady-Prioress, 193. 

Lagrange, 175. 

Lamarck, 131. 



INDEX 



369 



Lamb, Charles, On the Tragedies of 
Shakespeare, 220-236 (see Shake- 
speare) ; 

Notes on, 348-350; 
Quoted, 348, 349; 
xix, xxv, xxvii, xxxii, 133, 134, 
136, 138, 154, 168, 207, 339, 357; 

Poems, Plays, and Miscellaneous 
Essays of, 357. 

Lamb, Mary, 134. 

Lamont, quoted, xxviii; 357. 

Landa, 158, 161. 

Landgrave, 36, 37, 38. 

Landor, xxxii. 

Lang, 141, 142, 171. 

Language, 25, 31. 

Langue d'oc, 279. 

Langue d'oil, 279. 

Lanier, 162, 175. 

La Place, 33, 176. 

Last Days of E. A. Poe, 129. 

Last Days 0} Immanuel Kant, 17, 18. 

Laura, 203. 

Laws of fiction, 243-245. 

Lear, impossibility of acting, 231-232; 
97, 348. 

Lear, 304, 355- 

Lecky, 10. 

Lectures and Addresses, 343, 358. 

Lectures on Literature and Literary 
Subjects, 353. 

Lectures on Shakespeare, 349, 353, 356. 

Lee, xvi, 344, 357. 

Legion Club, 13. 

Leicester, 194, 196. 

Lemaitre, xix. 

Lenore, 142, 144, 344. 

Lessing, 17, 18. 

Letter on the Sacramental Test, 2. 

Letters to a Young Man whose Educa- 
tion has been neglected, 24, 25, 31. 

Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, 
quoted, 42-44; 34, 41 • 

Lever, 168. 

U evolution des genres dans Vhistoire de 
la litterature, 339, 356. 

Lewes, xxvii. 

Liberal, 307. 

Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, x, xi, 

357- 

Life and Letters of Macaulay, 342, 358. 



Life in Poetry, Law in Taste, xiv, 356. 

Life of De Quincey, 16, 357. 

Life of Poe: Gill's, 131; Ingram's, 
130, 131, 138, 143, 146, 175; Stod- 
dard's, 131, 149, 165. 

Life of Sheridan, 101. 

Life of Swift, 1 ; also, for various lives, 
338, 356, 358. 

Life of William Morris, xi, 357. 

Life of WilliamS hakes pear e, xvi, 344, 35 7 . 

Ligeia, 139, 159. 

LlLLO, 225. 

Literary classification (see Literary 
Criticism, and Literature). 

Literary criticism (see also Criticism, 
Fiction, Poetry, etc.); accord with 
common taste, xxiv; as affected by 
temperament, xii, xiii, xiv, aim of, 
xv, analysis of, xxvi, xxvii, appeal of, 
183, authors quoted on, ix-xi, 
classes of, xv-xviii, commercial, 
66-67, common method of, 132, 
comparative poverty of English, 169- 
170, conflict between liberty and 
authority, xiv, conventional types of, 
xxii, corroborative effort of, xxiv, 
as a cult-idea, xxiv, defined, xv, 
xxvi, defined by form, xxi, as 
demonstration, xiv, different points 
of view, xiii, different types of, 168- 
170, discrepancies in, ix, xi, ele- 
ments of, xviii, as essay writing, 169, 
essential lack of precision in, xv, 
excellence of French, 169-170, 
examples of student, xxviii-xxix, as 
existential fact, xii, as expression of 
personal opinion, xi-xii, fallacies 
in, — the confusion of types, 160, of 
depreciation, 153-154, of "heart and 
head," 160, of local dislike, 141, of 
argument from mental weakness, 
I 37 -I 39> °f published sentiment, 
135, of "seriousness," 154, — as a 
fine art, 166, as form, xiv, as a form 
of discourse, xxii, impossibility of 
final judgments, xii, influence of, 
63-67, kinds of proof in, xxiii, law 
in, xiv, methods of, 63-67, need of 
biographical facts in, 127-139, of a 
general survey of the facts, 1 40-1 41, 
of periodical rejudgments, 126, occa- 



37° 



INDEX 



sion of, xxii, as a process, xiv, pro- 
gram for writing, xxxi-xxxiii, proof of 
opinion, xxii-xxvi, provincialism in, 
1 66, reading of, xxvi-xxvii, reason- 
ing in, 167, 169, relation to narra- 
tion, exposition, description, and 
argumentation, xxii, to rhetoric, xxi, 
xxii, sanction of opinion in popular 
acceptance, xxiv, as science, 169, 
scientific checks on opinion, xxv- 
xxvi, special issues in, 337-355 
{passim), student, xxviii, xxix, as 
taste, xxiv, types of, xviii-xxi. 
typical faults of student, xxix-xxxi, 
vagueness in terminology, xiii, vari- 
ous masters of, xxvii, various opin- 
ions of, ix, x, xi, variousness of 
demonstration in, xxiii, the writing 
of, xxviii-xxxiii. 

Literary interpretation, xvii-xviii. 

Literary Messenger, 177. 

Literary opinion, growth of, 65-66. 

Literary Reminiscences, 343, 356. 

Literary Studies, xxxi, 80, 343, 356. 

Literature, classification of, 32-33, 338, 
341, inadequacy of definitions of, xv; 
its permanence, 329, its transitoriness, 
66, 67. 

Littlewit, 189. 

Lives of the Poets, 45, 340, 357. 

Livy, 313, 321. 

Loci Critici, vi, 358. 

Locke, John, 329. 

Locke, R. A., 155. 

Logic of Political Economy, 25, 30. 

London Magazine, 39. 

Longfellow, translation quoted, 72; 
146, 147, 167. 

Longinus, xii, 186. 

Longmans' Magazine, 237. 

Lord Carlisle on Pope, 25, 31. 

Lord 0} the Isles, quoted, 69. 

Lounsbury, xvi, 345, 350, 357. 

Love stories, nature of, 1 00-101. 

Lover neither Dead nor Alive, 55. 

Lover's Heart a Hand Grenado, 55. 

Lowell, vi, xvii, xxvii, xxxi, 159, 160, 
165, 166, 167, 175, 178, 343, 357; 
The Writings of, 357; 
Prose Works, xvii, 343. 

Lucan, 189, 316, 326. 



LUCIAN, 23, 147. 

Lucilius, 190. 

Lucrece, 300. 

Lucretia, 305. 

Lucretius, 190, 221, 321, 326. 

Lucy Gray, 141. 

Lusiad, 326. 

Luther, 137, 327. 

Lydgate, 190. 

Lyrical Ballads, origin of the, 294-295 ; 

preface to, 295 ; 355. 
Lyrical Prose Phantasy, 39. 
Lysippus, 22. 
Lytton, 160. 

Macaulay, Mr. Robert Montgomery's 

Poems, 60-79 ( see Montgomery); 

notes on, 340-341; xx, 167, 168, 210, 

240, 341, 35o. 
Macbeth, 230, 233. 
Macbeth, Lady, 221, 228. 
Macbeth, 228, 233, 235, 236. 
Machiavelli, 319. 
Mackail, xi, 357. 
Madeline, xxix. 
Maecenas, 63, 191. 
MaelzeVs Chess Player, 156, 158. 
M^evius, 335. 
Mahomet, 138. 
Maitland, x, xi, 357. 
Makers of Literature, 343, 359. 
Malthus, 25. 
Man and Superman, 358. 
Manilius, 187. 
Mantegna, 203. 
Manual of Conchology, 131. 
Marcus Antoninus, 23. 
Marginalia, 167, 170, 171. 
Mar got la Bala free, 252. 
Marino, 48. 
Marot, 272. 

Marquis Wellesley, 17, 18. 
Martial, 189, 200. 
Martin, 77. 

Martin Chuzzlewit, 91, 101. 
Mason, 6. 
"Masque," 37, 38. 
Masque of the Red Death, 159. 
Masson, De Quincey's Writings, 17-44 

(see De Quincey); notes on, 338- 

339. 344, 357- 



INDEX 



371 



Mater Lachrymarum, 42, 43, 44. 

Mater Suspiriorum, 43, 44. 

Mater Tenebrarum, 44. 

Maudsley, 138. 

Maximilian, 36, 37, 38. 

Measure of Value, 25. 

Meinhold, 118. 

Memorial Chronology on a new and 

more apprehensible system, 25, 29. 
Memorial Suspiria, 34, 41. 
Memories and Portraits, 350, 358. 
Menander, 23. 
Merchant, the, 193. 
Metamorphoses, 181. 
Metaphysical poetry, characteristics, 

45-48; illustrated, 48-59. 
Metaphysical Poets, 45-59. 
Micawber, 244. 
Michael, 118. 

Michael Angelo, 33, 231, 329. 
Milbourn, 195, 199, 201, 344. 
Mill, xxvii, xxviii, 31, 124, 176, 354. 
Miller, the, 193. 
Millwood, 226. 
Milton, quoted, 223, 235, 277, 285, 

333; xxiv, xxxi, 29, 48, 137, 182, 207, 

209, 210, 221, 274, 281, 283, 284, 285, 

306, 313, 319, 325, 326, 329. 
Milton, 17, 25, 31. 

Milton vs. Southey and Landor, 25, 31. 
Minto, quoted, 179; 144, 157. 
Miracles as Subjects of Testimony, 25,27. 
Miranda, 234. 

Miscellanies, ix, 342, 343, 352, 357, 358. 
Mr. Robert Montgomery's Poems, 60- 

79 (see Montgomery). 
Modern American Oratory, xxii, 358. 
Modern English Prose, xxxi, 356. 
Modem Greece, 17, 19. 
Modern Humanists, xxi, 340, 352, 358. 
Modern Painters, xxii, 208, 211, 212, 

215, 218, 342, 358. 
Modern Superstition, 17. 
Modest Proposal for Preventing the 

Children of Poor People in Ireland 

from being a Burden to their Parents 

or Country, 13-14. 
Moliere, 168. 
Monk, the, 191. 
Montaigne, 188. 
Montesquieu, 132. 



Montgomery, Criticism by Macaulay. 
his absurdity, 70, anachronisms, 72, 
artificiality, 73, bad anatomy, 72, 
bad characterization, 77-78, bad 
English, 74, 75, 76, bad logic, 74, 
bad observation, 72, bad syntax, 
69, 71, clumsiness, 69-70, flat- 
ness, 68, 69, faults illustrated by 
the Omnipresence of the Deity, 68- 
77, by Satan, 77-78, an illustration 
of what can be done by puffing, 67-68 
looseness of structure, 71, 72, 77 
obscurity, 73, 74, plagiarism, 68 
69, profanity, 71, redundancy, 72 
silly metaphysics, 74; quoted, 68-76 
78; xx, 340, 350. 

Moon Hoax, 155, 158. 

Moon Story, 155. 

Moore, George, 152. 

Moore, Thomas, 62, 168. 

Moral criticism of literature, xviii. 

Morality in characterization, Bagehot 
on, 95-99. 

Morality in fiction, 254-256. 

Morality in literature, 184. 

Morality in poetry, 301-302, 315-316. 

More, Sir T., quoted, 77. 

Morella, 139. 

Morice, 172. 

Morley, xxvii, 115, 124, 341, 343, 357. 

Morning Chronicle, 80. 

Morning Post, 77. 

Morris, quoted, xi. 

Moses, 322. 

Mott, 138. 

Mould, Mr., 91. 

Mozart, 150. 

Mucklewrath, 1. 

Murder considered as One of the Fine 
Arts, 33, 34. 

Murders in the Rue Morgue, 139, 156, 
159, 172. 

Murphy, 228. 

Myers, xxvii. 

Mystery of Marie Roget, 139, 156. 

Nancy, 98. 

Napoleon, quoted, 270. 

Narcissus, 188. 

National Temperance Movements, 25, 26. 

Naturalism in fiction, 157-158. 



37 2 



INDEX 



Nature in poetry, 294. 

Nelson, 30. 

New Eclectic Magazine, 161. 

New Essays toward a Critical Method, 
x, xvi, 126, 343, 354, 35 8 - 

Newgate calendar, 19. 

Newton, 33. 

Neav York Sun, 155. 

Nichol, 339, 344, 357- 

Nicholas Nickleby, 80, 88. 

Nonnus, 326. 

Nordau, 172. 

Note on Hazlitt, 17. 

Note- taking in fiction, 246-247. 

Notes from the Pocket-Book of a Late 
Opium- Eater, 24, 25. 

Notes on Godwin and Foster, 25. 

Notes on Walter Savage Landor, 25. 

Novel (see Besant, Fiction, James) as 
an artistic thing, 240-241 ; dis- 
tinguished from the Romance, 248- 
249; essence of, 242-243; "laws" 
of, 243-245; liking the test of, 249- 
251; material of, 251-254; morality 
in, 254-256; need of a theory of, 
237-238; seriousness of, 238-240; 
vulgarization of, 242. 

Obiter Dicta, 134. 

Ode on the Recollections of Early Child- 
hood, 120, 122. 

Ode to the Nightingale, 144. 

Odyssey, 185. 

(Edipus Tyr annus, 317, 355. 

Of his Mistress Bathing, 53. 

Ogilby, 199. 

Old Curiosity Shop, quoted, 89-90. 

Oliver, 274. 

Oliver Goldsmith, 25. 

Oliver Twist, 91, 97-99, 104. 

Ollier's Literary Magazine, 307. 

Omnipresence of the Deity, quoted, 
68-77 passim; 60. 

On an Inconstant Woman, 53. 

On Christianity as an Organ of Political 
Movement, 25, 29. 

On English Prose, 348. 

On Poetry and Poetic Power, 294-306 
(see Poetry). 

On Style in Literature, 346, 348, 358. 

On Suicide, 24. 



Onthe KnockingattheGateinMacbeth, 25. 
On the Political Parties of Modern 

England, 25, 30. 
On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, 220- 

236 (see Lamb). 
On the Words of Brother Protestants, 11. 
On Translating Homer, 164, 342, 353, 

356. 
On War, 25, 26. 
On Wordsworth's Poetry, 25, 31. 
Ophelia, 97, 225, 227. 
Origen, 78, 120. 
Originality, x, 107-109. 
Orion, 168. 

Orlando Furioso, 326, 331. 
Orthographic Mutineers, 25. 
Osburn, 20. 
Ossian, xv. 
Othello, 221, 223, 225, 226, 232, 348, 

349- 
Othello, 304. 
Otway, 62. 
Our Corner, 126. 
Ovid, compared with Chaucer, 187- 

189; quoted, 188; 181, 182, 195, 

198, 321, 345. 

Pacuvius, 321. 
Pagan Oracles, 17, 23, 24. 
Page, 30. 

Palamon, 189, 198, 199. 
Palamon and Arcite, 187, 195, 198. 
Palimpsest of the Human Brain, 24, 25. 
Pallas, 265. 

Pall Mall Gazette, 252, 253, 255. 
Pamphlet on the Use of Irish Manu- 
factures, 3-4. 
Paradise Lost, 76, 221, 259, 325, 326, 

33*- 
Paradiso, 276. 
Parr, 19-21, 30. 
Partial Portraits, 237, 357. 
Pater, on Wordsworth, 111-125 (see 

Wordsworth); notes on, 342-343; 

quoted, x, 342 ; xi, xix, xxv, 340, 341, 

355, 357- 

Pathetic Fallacy, 208. 

Pathetic Fallacy, 342, 358. 

Patronage, evils of, 61-62; emancipa- 
tion of authors from, 62-63. 

Pattison, xxvii. 



INDEX 



373 



Paulina, 36, 37, 38. 

Payne, vi, 357. 

Peacock, 307, 355, 357. 

Peleus, 276. 

Peneus, 195. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 17. 

Perfect Wagnerite, xvii, 358. 

Pericles, 21, 22, 23. 

Perry, 351, 357. 

Persius, 187. 

Personal estimate in criticism, 271, 288. 

Peterborough, ii. 

Petrarch, 187, 203, 279, 324, 327, 329. 

Petronius, quoted, 298. 

Phidias, 22. 

Philemon, 188. 

Philosophy 0} Composition, 257-268 

{see Poe), 353, 357. 
Philosophy of Furniture, 179. 
Philosophy of Herodotus, 17, 19. 
Physick and Chirurgery for a Lover, 54. 
Pickwick, Mr., 92, 93, 95, 96, 104, 342. 
Pickwick Papers, quoted, 92-94; 80, 

91, 95-96, 99, 100, 103, 104, 108. 
Piers Plowman, 191, 345. 
Pi LP ay, 60. 
Pinch, Ruth, 101. 
Pindar, 23. 

PlSISTRATUS, 21. 

Pit and the Pendulum, 159. 

Pitt, 30. 

Plato, xii, 22, 26, 81, 82, 83, 299, 312, 
322, 323, 325. 

Plato's Republic, 24, 26, 338. 

Plautus, 200. 

Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, 358. 

Pleasures of Hope, 74. 

Plutarch, 23, 313. 

Poe, David, 128. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, The Philosophy 
of Composition, 257-268: composi- 
tion, effect in, 258, need of analysis 
of the processes of, 258-259, order 
in, 257, popular errors in regard to, 
257-258, composition illustrated by 
the Raven: climax, 263-264, de- 
velopment, 266-268, intention, 259, 
length, 259-260, mood, beautiful 
and universal, 260-261, originality, 

264, refrain, 261-262, rhythm, 264- 

265, situation, 265-266, tone, 261; 



Robertson on Poe, 126-180: — 
Introduction, necessity of rejudging 
the case of Poe, 126, because of 
injustice done him, 127; Life and 
Character, 128-139: compared 
with Lamb, 133-134, 136, and other 
writers, 136-137, disposition, 129- 
130, heredity and training, 128-129, 
morality in literary matters, 130-132, 
in personal matters, 132-137, nature of 
his disease, 137-139, and malevolence 
of critics regarding it, 139; Per- 
sonality, 176-180, essential great- 
ness, 179-180; Poetry, 140-153: 
critical disparagement of Poe, 141- 
142, disposition of his censors, 140, 
disproportionate amount of atten- 
tion given to his poetry, 140, 
essential quality of his verse, 143-153 : 
inferior work, 143-144, his valuable 
work, 144-153, —its art, 146, lyric 
power, 151-153, originality, 147- 
148, sense for allegory, 1 50-1 51, 
spirituality, 145, variety, 151-153, 
vividness and power, 148-149; 
Prose, 153-176, comparative neg- 
lect of it, 153 : his Literary Criticism, 
1 64-1 71, freedom from politics, etc., 
1 70-1 71, his humour essential to the 
understanding of the criticism, 164- 
165, its intellectual power, 169, 
reasoning skill, 167-168, scientific 
nature, 166-167, superiority to con- 
temporary work, 167, its weaknesses, 
168; Philosophic Writings, 171-176: 
hampered by orthodoxy, 173-174, 
and some bad logic, 174-175, imagi- 
native and poetical quality, 171- 
173, reasoning power, 172-173, 
superiority of Eureka, 176; Scientific 
Writings, 161-164: expert opinion 
on the scholarship of Poe, 1 61-163, 
refuted, 162-164; Tales, 153-161: 
critical views of them, 153-154, 
their many excellences, 156-157, 
intellectual fibre, 154-156, 157, 160- 
161, originality, 161, psychologic 
realism, 158-159, verisimilitude, 157— 
158, vividness and compactness of 
structure, 1 59-1 60 ; 

Notes on, 343~344, 35 1 ; 



374 



INDEX 



Poe, continued. 

Quoted, 134, 13S, 143. 145. 146, 
147, 148, 149-150, 151-152, 155, 162, 
163, 167, 168, 169, 173, 174, 175. a6 4, 
266, 267, 268; 

xvi, xvii, xviii, xx, xxvi, xxx, 352, 

353. 354, 355, 357- 
Poe, 126-180. 
Poe, W. H., 128. 
Poem, limit of length in, 259-260. 
Poems, by M. Arnold, 83. 
Poe's Eureka and Recent Scientific 

Speculations, 161. 
Poe's Works, 127, 131, 147, 160, 171, 

173, !74, 175, 177. 

Poet, his mission, 299-300 (see Poetry). 

Poetical Propagation of Light, 55. 

Poetic Principle, 147, 351, 357. 

Poetic prose, 39, 205. 

Poetry: authority over language, art, 
and social relations, 310, cardinal 
points of, 294, Christian poetry, 
322-324, classes of, 294, connate 
with the origin of man, 307-308, 
course of English, 280-293, Dante 
in the stream of poetry, 325-327, 
decline of, in Greece, 319-322, de- 
fined, 298, distinguished from other 
literature, 297-298, from science, 
297, difference between it and nar- 
ration, 313, effect of, 313-315, ele- 
ments of a poem, 296-306, essential 
poets, 312, excellence of Athenian, 
316-317, examples of unmetrical, 
299, expression of the eternal order of 
beauty, 309-310, fallacies in the 
judgment of, 271-275, greatness, 
331-336, illustrated by Venus and 
Adonis, 300-306, idea of love in, 
324-325, inevitableness, 311-312, 
as an imitative art, 45, inspiration, 
330-331, material of, 310-311, 
methods of the study of, 273-275, 
Milton in the stream of, 325-327, 
metre and harmony in, 312, 
most perfect expression of the in- 
visible, 311, need of poetry, 270, 293, 
330, need of a high standard, 270- 
271, the offspring of the imagination, 
307-308, parallel between intel- 
lectual greatness and poetic excel- 



lence, 318-319, partial poets, 313, 
purpose of, 297-298, qualities of, 
143-144, 300, in Rome, 321-322, 
seriousness in, 278, superficial form, 
296-297, superiority to reason, 327- 
329, "touchstones" for judging 
poetry, 275-278, ultimate good of, 
293, utility of, 328-330. 

Poets and Poetry of America, 136, 147. 

Polonius, 227. 

Polybius, 23. 

POMPEY, 24. 

Pope, as poetical classic, 284, 286, 287; 
quoted, 286; 10, 62, 68, 137, 338, 340, 

353- 
Pope, 17, 18. 

Popular judgments, 66-67. 
Porphyro, xxix. 
Posthumus, 223, 349. 
Postulates of Political Economy, 176. 
Power of Words, 172. 
Prceterita, 206, 218. 
Praxiteles, 33. 

Preface to the Fables, 1 81-201, 344. 
Prelude, 115, 121, 161. 
Presence of Mind, 25. 
Priam, 276. 

Principles of Science, 176. 
Prioress's Tale, 281. 
Professor Wilson, 17. 
Prometheus Unbound, 292. 
Prose, requisites of, 285 (see Poetry). 
Prose phantasy, 39. 
Prospero, 234. 

Protestantism, quoted, 28-29; 25, 27. 
Puffing, its decadence, 67; effect on 

the public, 65-66; illustrated by Mr. 

Montgomery, 67-68; meanness of, 

63, 65 ; methods and tricks, 63-65 ; 

superceding of patronage, 63. 

PULTENEY, 12. 

Purloined Letter, 159. 
Pythagoras, 23, 323. 

Querist, 14. 
Quinctilian, xii. 
Quintessence of Ibsenism, 358. 
Quintus Calaber, 326. 

Rachel, 123. 
Radcllefe, 38. 



INDEX 



375 



Ramsay, xxxi. 
Raphael, 329, 333. 
Rationale of Verse, 161, 164. 
Raven, composition of the, 259-268; 
quoted, 264, 266, 267, 268; 142, 144, 

344, 35i- 
Realism, see Fiction, James, Besant, 

Novel, etc. 
Reason, compared with imagination, 307. 
Recluse, 115. 

Recollections of the Lake Poets, 17. 
Reeve, the, 193. 
Reflector, 220. 

Refrain, 261-262, 263-264. 
Regulus, 321. 
Renaissance, x, 342, 343. 
Representative Essays on the Theory 

of Style, 346, 348, 356. 
Resolution and Independence, 114. 
Restoration poetry and prose, 284-286. 
Retreat, 122. 

Revolt of a Tartar Tribe, 17, 18, 34. 
Revolution in Greece, 17. 
Revue Content poraine, 170. 
Reynolds, 114. 
Rhetoric, 17, 19, 25, 31. 
Rhipaeus, 325. 
Rhythm, 264-265. 
Richard Bentley, 17, 18. 
Richard II., 191. 
Richard III., 229, 230. 
Richter, 39, 40. 
Ring walt, xxii, 358. 
Rip Van Winkle, 133. 
Robert, King of Naples, 198. 
Robert Browning, 350, 356. 
Robertson, E. S., 358. 
Robertson, F. W., 343, 358. 
Robertson, J. M., on Poe, 126-180 (see 

Poe); on the need of criticism, x; 

notes on, 343-344; quoted, x; 

xvii, xx, xxi, xxvi, xxvii, 340, 343, 

344, 352, 354, 358. 
Robinson Crusoe, 157, 259. 
Rochester, 190. 
Roderick, 77. 
Roland, 274. 
Roman Feasts, 187. 
Romance, 248-249. 
Romance Poetry, 278-280. 
Romeo, 223, 349. 



Romola, xxx. 

Rossetti, D. G., x, xi. 

Rossetti, M. F., xvii, 358. 

Rousseau, 113, 325, 329. 

Ruskin, Harrison on, 202-219: his 
alliteration, 209, change of manner, 
217-218, consonance, 209-213, draw- 
backs, 205-206, genius, 202, great- 
ness, 218-219, ideas, 203-204, 
imagination, 213-217, lack of re- 
straint, 215-217, length of sen- 
tences, 207, 215, lucidity, 206-207, 
mastery of English, 202, originality, 
217, power over epithets, 208, pro- 
fusion, 205-206, qualities, 204, 
temperament, 202-203, 2 °6 ; 
Notes on, 345-348; 
Quoted, 208, 211,212,214-215,216; 
xxii, xxvii, 340, 342, 358. 

Ruskin as a Master of Prose, 202-219. 

Ruth, 118. 

Saint Agnes' Eve, xxviii, 114. 

St. Bernard, 206. 

St. Catharine of Siena, 123. 

St. Francis, 203. 

St. John (see Bolingbroke). 

Sainte-beuve, x; quoted, 270. 

Saintsbury, quoted, xii ; vi, xxvii, 350, 

358. 
Samuel lohnson, 338, 358. 
Sandys, 182. 
Sartor Resartus, 217. 
Satan, 77, 78, 231, 325. 
Satan, quoted, 78; 60, 77. 
Saturday Review, 108, 159. 
Savannah-la-Mar, 34, 41. 
Sawyer, Bob, 95. 
Scenery, stage, 235-236. 
Scenes from Politian, 141. 
Schiller, 17. 
Schlosser's Literary History 0} the 

Eighteenth Century, 25, 31. 
School for Scandal, 101. 
Schubert, 150. 
Schultze, 35. 
Science in Criticism, 344. 
Scientific criticism, xx. 
Scientific Use of the Imagination and 

Other Essays, 176. 
Scienza Nuova, 26. 



376 



INDEX 



Scipio, 23. 

Scott, F. N., vi, 350. 

Scott, Sir W., quoted, 69; x, 1, 38, 

62, 69, 70, 77, 338, 358. 
Scribner's Magazine, 129, 137. 

SCUDERY, MLLE. DE, 197. 

Secret Societies, 17. 

Selections from the Essays 0} Francis 
Jeffrey, xx, 340, 356. 

Senancour, 113. 

Sentences, 207-208, 215. 

Seriousness in fiction, 238-239; in 
poetry, 278. 

Seven Lamps of Architectures, 205, 207, 
218. 

Shadow, 139. 

Shadow of Dante, xvii, 358. 

Shakespeare, Lamb on the Tragedies 
of, 220-236: deadening effect of see- 
ing him acted, 222, essential nature of 
his characters, 223, fashion for act- 
ing, 221, imaginative quality, 233, im- 
possibility of his being acted, 222, 
especially Hamlet, 223-225, and 
Lear, 231-232, mutilated by fol- 
lowers, 229, 231, 234, his natural- 
ness, 225, observation of life, 226, 
results of seeing him acted, 222, 
spiritual quality, 223, vulgarization 
by actors, 226-227; 
Notes on, 348-350; 
Quoted, 70, 74, 228, 229, 276, 286, 

3°3> 3°4, 3°5> 3 22 ; 

x, xvi, xvii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 65, 70, 
78, 82, 83, 97, 122, 276, 282, 283, 
291, 300, 302, 306, 325, 329, 341, 348, 

349, 35°, 354- 
Shakespeare, 17, 18, 349, 356. 
Shakespeare the Man, 341. 
Shakespeare's Posthumous Reputation, 

xvi, 344. 
Shakesperian Wars, xvi, 357. 
Shallow, 236. . 
Shaw, xvii, 349, 35 8 - 
Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 307-336 
(see Poetry) ; 
Notes on, 355; 
Quoted, 116, 292, 355; 
ix, xviii, xxiii, 114, 116, 209, 212, 
2T4, 215, 216, 292, 351, 358; 

Works of, in prose and verse, 358. 



Sheridan, R. B., ioi. 

Sheridan, T., n. 

Shew, quoted, 138; 137. 

Shipman, the, 193. 

Short View of the Profaneness of the 

English Stage, 344. 
Siddons, 221, 228, 348. 
Sidney, xxvii, 345. 
Silence, 139. 
Sill, xxxi. 

Sir William Hamilton, 17. 
Snodgrass, Mr., 96. 
Socrates, 22, 289. 
Solomon, 322. 
Some Principles of Literary Criticism, 

xiv, 359. 
Some Words with a Mummy, 171. 
Sonnet, quoted, 303, 304. 
Sophocles, 22, 320. 
Sortilege and Astrology, 33, 34. 
Southern Literary Messenger, 155. 
Southey, 17, 77, 136, 137, 279. 
Spanish Military Nun, 34. 
Specimens of Narration, 350, 356. 
Specimens of the English Dramatic 

Poets, 349, 357. 
Spencer, 172, 175, 176. 
Spenser, 182, 190, 281, 316, 325, ^^. 
Spirit of the Age, 343, 346, 359. 
Spurgeon, 103. 
Stage machinery, hurtful to Shakespeare, 

234-235- 
Stanhope, 10. 
Statius, 61, 326. 
Stedman, quoted, 137, 164, 178; 

xxvii, 127, 141, 150, 164, 175, 177, 

178, 344- 
Stephen, Sir J., quoted, xi. 
Stephen, L., on Wood's Halfpence, 

1 -1 5 (see Swift); notes on, 337-338; 

quoted, x; xv, xxiii, 343, 358. 
Stevenson, 154, 253, 346, 348, 350, 358. 
Stoddard, quoted, 149, 165, 177; 131, 

141, 150, 165. 
Stones of Venice, 218. 
Stringham, quoted, 175. 
Structure in Verse, 264-268. 
Student criticism, quoted, xxvii, xxix. 
Studies of a Biographer, 338, 358. 
Studies in Chaucer, 345, 357. 
Studies in Literature, 343, 357. 



INDEX 



377 



Studies in Structure and Style, 346, 356. 

Study of Poetry, 269-293 {see Arnold and 
poetry); 345- 

Study 0} Prose Fiction, 351, 357. 

Style, quoted, 21-23; 17, 19, 25, 31. 

Subjunctive, treatise on, 163. 

Suckling, 48. 

Summoner, the, 193. 

Sunderland, 6. 

Supernatural in poetry, 294. 

Suspiria de Profundis, 16, 34, 41. 

Swift, Work for Ireland (Wood's 
Halfpence), 1-15: Swift's arguments 
against Wood's coinage, 4-8, at- 
tempt to reenter English politics, 
11-12, compared with Berkeley, 15, 
criticism of his position, 14-15, 
effect of his victory, 9-1 1, hatred of 
oppression, 1-2, literary skill, 6, 7, 
13, 14, main issue of the Drapier's 
Letters, 8, origin of the Drapier's 
Letters, 4, policy for the Irish, 7-8, 
popularity, 10-n, temperament, 
temper, and sincerity, 2, 12, 13, 14, 
view of the Irish, 2-3, work subse- 
quent to the Drapier's Letters, 12-14, 
writings, Drapier's Letters, 4-10, 15, 
Legion Club, 13, Modest Proposal, 
13-14, Pamphlet of 1720, 3-4, 
various tracts, 1 2-1 3 ; 
Notes on, 337~33 8 ; 
Quoted, 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 13, 14; 
xv, xvii, xxiii, xxxii, 154, 206, 
207, 210, 339. 

Swift's Letters, 2, 3, 7, 12; 
Lives of, 356-358. 

Swift's Works, 1, 338, 358. 

Swinburne, ix, x, xi, 150, 153, 343, 
352, 358- 

Sykes, 98. 

System of Logic, 176. 

System of the Heavens as revealed by 
Lord Rosse's Telescope, 24, 25. 

Tacitus, quoted, 190. 

Taillefer, 274. 

Tales of Mystery, 153, 154. 

Talleyrand, 82. 

Tamerlane, 141. 

Tarn Glen, 291, 292. 

Tarn o'Shanter, 291. 



Tapley, Mark, 91. 

Tasso, quoted, ^^^; 61, 316, 325. 

Taste, defined, xxiv; history of, xiv. 

Taste of Dickens, 106-107. 

Tate, 229. 

Taylor, 206, 207, 299. 

T ell-Tale Heart, 159. 

Tempest, 234, 348. 

Tendencies in criticism, xv-xxi. 

Tennyson, quoted, 210, 216; 164, 167, 

179, 209, 215, 341, 351. 
Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other 

Literary Estimates, 202, 357. 
Text of Shakespeare, 350, 357. 
Textual criticism, xv. 
Thackeray, xxvii, 81, 101, 136, 158, 

160, 167, 237. 
Theban Sphinx, 25. 
Themistocles, 21. 
Theocritus, 23, 320. 
Theoria Sacra, 299. 

Theory and Practice of Criticism, xvi,343- 
Theory of Greek Tragedy, 25, 31. 
Theseid, 335. 

Thoreau, xxix, xxx, 178. 
Three Ladies of Sorrow, 42. 
Three Plays for Puritans, 358. 
Thucydides, 22, 108. 

TlLLOTSON, 78. 
TlMiEUS, 323. 

Times, 64. 

Tintern Abbey, 99, 120. 

Toad-in-the-hole, 34. 

To a Grecian Urn, xxix. 

To a Lady who wrote Poesies for Rings, 

quoted, 50. 
To Helen, quoted, 144; 145. 
Toilette of a Hebrew Lady, 17. 
Tolstoy, 349, 358. 
Tone, 261-262. 

Tory's Account of Toryism, 25, 30. 
Touchstones, 275-278. 
Translation, 181-182, 194-197. 
Treasure, 279. 
Treasure Island, 154. 
Treatise of the Astrolabe, 187. 
Trent, xiv, 358. 
Trevelyan, 342, 358. 
Troilus and Cressida, 187. 
Trollope, 161, 239, 240. 
Trotter, Job, 104. 



378 



INDEX 



True History, 147. 
Tubal Cain, 23. 
Tulliver, Maggie, xxx. 
Tully {see Cicero), xix. 
turgenieff, 249. 
Turner, 206, 217. 
Turoldus, 274. 
Two April Mornings, 122. 
Tyndall, 176. 

Ulalume, quoted, 149-150; 351. 
Ulysses, 181, 185, 205, 314. 
Universal Prayer, 77. 
Unto this Last, 207, 217, 218. 

Valentine Vox, 168. 

Varied Types, 350, 356. 

Varieties of Religious Experience, xii, 

357- 

Varro, 321. 

Vaughn, C. E., vi, 359. 

Vaughan, H., 122. 

Venn, x. 

Venus, 302. 

Venus and Adonis, illustrative of choice 
of subjects, 301-302; of depth and 
energy of thought, 305-306; of ex- 
cellence of versification, 301 ; of 
imagery, 302-305; of poetic power, 
300-306; 354, 355- 

Versification, 296-297, 301. 

Ver-Vert, 162. 

Vico, 26. 

Villon, quoted, 283. 

Virgil, compared with Homer, 185- 
187, imitation of Homer, 185-187; 
quoted, 9; 189, 190, 191, 199, 285, 
297, 321. 325. 2,26, 333, 345. 

Vision 0} Sudden Death, 40, 41. 

Vita Nuova, 324. 

Vitet, 274, 275. 

Voltaire, 329. 

Walking Stewart, 17, 18. 
Wallace, xxviii. 
Walladmor, 25, 34. 
Waller, 48, 182, 190, 359. 
Walpole, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 12. 
Walter Pater, xvi, 356. 
Ward, A. W., xxvii. 
Ward, T. H., 269, 353, 359. 



Wardle, Mr., 92, 93. 

Waverley Novels, 86. 

Weller, Mr., 108. 

Weller, Sam, 91, 92, 93, 108. 

Whately, 31. 

What is Art? 349, 358. 

Whistle and Til come to you, 291. 

Whistle owre the lave o't, 290. 

White Doe of Rhylstone, 343. 

Whitman, Mrs., quoted, 127; 134, 

135, 162, 177. 
Whitman, W., 171. 
Whitshed, 4, 9. 
Wickliff, 191. 

WlELAND, 302. 

Wife of Bath, 193. 
Wife of Bath's Tale, 188. 
Willet, 85. 

William the Conqueror, 274. 
William Wilson, 139, 159. 
Willis, quoted, 136; 130. 
Winchester, xiv, 359. 
Wit, 45- 
Wits, 45, 46. 

Wolfram von Eschenbach, 280. 
Wood, nature of his patent, 4-6; 7, 8, 
9- 

WOODBERRY, XXvii, 1 2 7, 1 75, 343, 358. 

Wood's Halfpence, 1-16 (see Swift), 
338. 

Wordsworth, Coleridge on, 294-296: 
notion of the language of real life, 
295, permanent excellence of his 
poetry, 295-296, vogue, 295-296. 
Pater on, 111-125, basis of his un- 
evenness, 111-112, distinction be- 
tween Fancy and Imagination, in, 
his duality of moods, 112, excellence 
as a training in poetry, 11 2-1 13, in- 
dividuality in his work, 1 1 1 , necessity 
of separating the good from the bad, 
113, the residue, 11 3-1 24: — abil- 
ity to appreciate passion in the lowly, 
118, expression, 121-122, imagina- 
tive moods, 1 21-122, meditation on 
nature, 116, "pan-psychism," 116, 
philosophy, 1 20-121, sense of ex- 
pression in natural things, 11 3-1 14, 
sentiment, 11 6-1 17, sincerity, 116, 
solemnity, 11 7-1 18, his unevenness. 
112-113, his value, 122-125; 



INDEX 



379 



Wordsworth, continued. 
Notes on, 342-343; 
Essays on, 343; 
Quoted, 114, 115; 
ix, xvi, xxiv, xxvii, 17, 29, 31, 32,. 
90, 99, 137, 167, 209, 270, 282, 284, 
294, 295, 341, 35i» 352, 354, 355, 
359- 
Wordsworth, ix, in, 341, 357. 
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, 
or Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art 
in Poetry, xxxi, 341. 
Wordsworth and Byron, ix. 



Wordsworth's Complete Poetical Works, 

359- 
World and a Clock, 54. 
Wyatt, 131. 
Wyndham, Maximilian, 35. 



Xenophon, 22, 289. 
X-ing a Paragrab, 164. 



Zeus, 276. 

Zola, 157, 250, 256. 



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